Jj is for Jottings 94.  Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness and Phonics.

You may have heard the terms “phonological awareness”, “phonemic awareness” and “phonics” and wondered what they mean and whether they are different terms for the same thing.  Let’s sort this out right now.

PHONICS.

This is sound-letter links – i.e. learning which sound is made by each letter of the alphabet, and other sounds which are made by combining 2 or more letters.  Children develop the concept that there are consistent relationships between letter symbols and sounds.  This book is a great way to learn sound-letter links.  But you need to make sure you are saying sounds rather than letter names.  You can find this on the video.

PHONEMIC AWARENESS.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Phonemic awareness is one component of phonological awareness.  A phoneme is a single sound.  We combine the 41 English phonemes into syllables and words when we speak.  Phonemic awareness is knowledge about a phoneme and the ability to detect, blend, segment, and manipulate individual sounds in words.  Children with poor phonemic awareness skills will have trouble learning phonics and decoding, especially when they need to sound out and blend sounds to form new words.

Phonemic awareness skills include:

• Identifying individual sounds (phonemes). This may seem obvious, but it is amazing how many children just haven’t worked out the boundaries between one sound and the next.  If you ask them to tell you the first sound in a CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) word, they will give you CV.  This is far less likely to happen if they have a proper grounding in phonics, since they will have been exposed to individual sounds many times.  First children learn to identify beginning sounds, followed by end sounds, and finally middle sounds.
• Phoneme blending – pushing syllables or sounds together to make a whole spoken word. See separate articles on a sound blending game and more advanced sound blending.
• Phoneme segmentation/Sound analysis – when given a spoken word, the child can isolate individual sounds within the word. Here is an article on analysing sounds, and here are five activities for analysing consonant sounds.
• Phoneme manipulation – this comes later, and involves adding, deleting or substituting a sound.

Phonemic awareness skills are all about sounds in words, not about print i.e. listening, not looking.

PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS.

Phonological awareness is a bigger area, which includes having an awareness of words, of parts of words such as syllables, and of word endings like –og in “dog”.  This is in addition to phonemic awareness.  So, phonological awareness includes:

• Word awareness – breaking sentences into individual words, and breaking compound words into meaningful parts.
• Syllables – breaking words into syllables. Each syllable is a beat within the word, and you can clap or tap each one.
• Rhyme – recognition of rhymes and rhyme production. See previous articles on the benefits of early exposure to rhyming and activities to promote rhyming recognition and production.
• Alliteration – identifying and producing words which begin with the same sound as the target word. This assumes the ability to analyse the first sound in a word.
• Phonemic awareness.

WEAK PHONOLOGICAL AWARENESS SKILLS.

Children who have weak phonological awareness skills often try to do tasks visually, which is impossible.  This illustrates that they’ve missed the whole point.

Many of these children also think they are supposed to remember something, when you are actually asking them to listen.

They are also very poor at recognising patterns within words.  Eg. You ask them to read several words in the one word family – rat, cat, bat, sat, hat.  They don’t perceive that the ‘at’ is repeated in each word, and try to sound out each individual sound rather than treating the ‘at’ as a single unit after reading the first word.  Perceiving word chunks greatly facilitates the reading process, and competent readers automatically recognise and use them.

 

All phonological awareness skills have a basis in strong oral language skills, which includes caregivers reading stories to children each day as well as having conversations with children.  Listening skills develop alongside oral language skills, and phonological awareness skills depend a great deal on listening.  So – listening, oral language skills and literacy all feed off each other.

 

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