On Phonemic Awareness

"Phonemic awareness implies the ability to analyze and synthesize the sound structure of words. That is, children must realize that words are made up of individual sounds (phonemes) and that sounds, when combined, yield words. Furthermore, they must recognize that some words share phonemes. For example, the s in sun is the same sound that is heard at the end of bus." (Spector, "Phonemic Awareness Training", pp. 391-392).

Phonemically-aware children can also rearrange the sounds in a word to produce a different word, such as realizing that 'cat' contains the same sounds as 'tack' and 'act'. Also, phonemically-aware children can switch out phonemes in a word, producing other words, for example, removing the /f/  from 'phone' and replacing it with /b/ renders 'bone'.

Analayzing (dividing up) a word into its component phonemes is called segmentation.  Upon hearing the word 'phone', for example, a child who is phonemically aware will be able to say that the word contains three sounds, /f/, /o/, and /n/, in that order.

Stringing phonemes together to produce a word is called blending. For example, if a phonemically-aware child hears /f/, /o/, and /n/ pronounced separately from one another, that child will recognize that those three sounds combine to form the word 'phone'.

Manipulation of phonemes in a word means being able to move phonemes around, or substitute phonemes for one another, always producing different words. Given the word 'tack', for example, the phonemically-aware child will be able to rearrange the phonemes to produce 'act' and 'cat'; will be able to delete the first sound of 'cat' and recognize that the word 'at' is left over; and can replace the first sound of the word 'tack' with a /b/ sound to produce 'back'.

These three skills are the skills that make up phonemic awareness. None of these phonemic awareness skills — segmentation, blending, and moving and replacing sounds in words — require exposure to or knowledge of print. They require only a familiarity with how words sound.They can be cultivated working entirely by ear, perhaps with pictures of the objects that the words stand for, or with different colors or shapes of tokens to stand in for the phonemes. They are not spelling skills, which involve knowledge of the way English is written.

Phonemic awareness skills are not spelling skills, but they are foundation skills for learning to spell. In other words, a phonemically-aware child who has had no spelling instruction is more ready to learn to spell than a child who hasn't. And children who receive spelling instruction without explicit, separate phonemic awareness training may have a lot of difficulty learning to spell, especially if they have other learning difficulties.

Other skills mentioned in the Spector reading are not phonemic awareness skills, but are aspects of being able to spell English: spelling skills. These include, first of all, understanding the alphabetic principle: That a single grapheme of English represents, on the page, a single phoneme in pronunciation.

Knowing the English spelling system also involves learning, through instruction and experience with print, how graphemes are used to represent phonemes in English spelling. This means knowing the sound-symbol correspondences for English spelling: which graphemes (symbols) stand for which phonemes (sounds), and how this symbolization is patterened in English spelling.

This aspect of English spelling is very complex because of its many subregularities. Many phonemes are regularly represented by more than one grapheme. /f/, for example, is regularly represented by 'f' or 'ph', or by 'ff' in the middle and at the ends of words. 'f', 'ph', and 'ff' are all distinct graphemes: 'f' is a single-consonant grapheme; 'ph' is a digraph; and 'ff' is a double letter, in this case a double consonant-letter.

'Invented spellings' or 'developmental spellings' are the product of the child experimenting with sound-symbol correspondences. Such errors show that the child knows enough about the English spelling system to make a logical guess about how a word is spelled; but the child has not yet mastered the particular correct spellings for particular words. For example, a child who spells 'juice' as 'joos' has correctly internalized the 'oo' spelling for /u/ and the 's' spelling for /s/. These are logical guesses, but they happen not to be the correct way to spell the word. Research indicates that allowing children to use invented spellings in their early years (first and second grade) makes them better spellers in later life.

A child who has mastered the sound-symbol correspondences of English will be able to decode written words. That is to say, the child will be able to (a) recognize the different graphemes in the word; (b) be able to match each grapheme with a phoneme according to the rules of English spelling; and (c) will be able to string those phonemes together in the order in which the graphemes occur in the word, arriving at last at the pronunciation of the word. At this point, the child knows which word is written on the page because the child matches the phoneme sequence with that of a known word. If the word is not known, the child can ask another person by repeating the sound structure of the word, or can look the word up in the dictionary. Decoding is an early-reading skill. Fluent readers, past the beginner and intermediate stages, seldom need to decode words; they operate by whole-word recognition. But the ability to decode is essential in the early stages of reading.