The Foundation of Reading Starts with Listening

As a literacy interventionist, one of the questions I hear most often is, "What's the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness?"

The easiest way to explain it is to picture an umbrella.

Phonological awareness is the umbrella. Under that umbrella are several different listening and language skills that develop from simple to more complex. These include word awareness, syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness, and phonemic awareness.

These skills can and should be nurtured long before a child enters preschool. In fact, many of them can be practiced naturally through songs, nursery rhymes, and everyday conversations.

Word Awareness

The earliest stage is learning that sentences are made up of individual words. Children also begin to notice patterns in language through activities like rhyming and alliteration. Hearing that cat, hat, and bat rhyme or recognizing that Silly Sammy sings begins with the same sound helps build early language awareness.

Syllable Awareness

Once children begin recognizing words, they can learn to break them into smaller chunks called syllables.

For example, the word apple can be broken into ap-ple, and the word dinosaur can be broken into di-no-saur. Clapping, tapping, or marching out syllables makes this skill fun and engaging.

Onset-Rime Awareness

This skill is often introduced around kindergarten.

The onset is the first sound in a word, and the rime is everything that comes after it. For example, in the word cat, /c/ is the onset and /at/ is the rime. In the word sun, /s/ is the onset and /un/ is the rime.

Recognizing these sound patterns helps children prepare for decoding and spelling.

Phonemic Awareness: The Most Advanced Skill

Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonological awareness, and the two terms are frequently used interchangeably. However, they are not the same.

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a language.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate those individual sounds within words. This includes segmenting sounds, blending sounds, adding sounds, deleting sounds, and substituting sounds.

Let's use the word wish.

When segmenting, we ask, "What sounds do you hear?" The answer is /w/ /i/ /sh/.

When blending, we put those sounds back together to make the word wish.

For phoneme addition, we might ask, "What word would we have if we added the sound /iz/ to the end?" The answer is wishes.

For phoneme deletion, we could ask, "What word would we have if we took away the /w/?" The answer is ish.

Yes, that is a nonsense word, and that is perfectly okay. Nonsense words are actually an important part of phonemic awareness because they show that a child is manipulating sounds rather than relying on memorized words.

For phoneme substitution, we might ask, "What word would we have if we changed the /w/ in wish to /f/?" The answer is fish.

The Most Important Thing Parents Should Know

All of these activities can be done without ever showing a child a single letter.

Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are auditory skills. Children are listening to sounds, playing with sounds, and manipulating sounds. They do not need to see printed words to practice these important abilities.

Simple games in the car, during bath time, or while making dinner can have a powerful impact on a child's future reading success.

Before children can read words on a page, they first need to understand the sounds that make those words possible.