What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to process sounds in spoken language. It is vital for the acquisition of spelling and reading skills and is an important foundation for a child to develop.
Research in the area of literacy development has indicated that children, who have solid phonemic awareness skills, will develop better literacy skills. A good reader is a confident learner!

Phonemic awareness skills include the following:

• Identifying and generating rhyming words i.e. cat, mat, rat
• Segmenting words, syllables, and sentences i.e. ‘cat-er-pill-ar’ has 4 syllables and ‘grow’ has 3 phonemes or sounds e.g. g-r-ow
• Isolating sounds in words i.e. the word ‘bat’ begins with a /b/, ends with a /t/ and has an /a/ sound in the middle.
• Deleting words and sounds i.e. rainbow without ‘rain’ is ‘bow’. The word fox without the /f/ sound is ‘ox’.
• Blending words, syllables and sounds i.e. hot+dog = ‘hotdog’ and com + pu + ter = ‘computer’. The sounds b-a-g, make the word ‘bag’.
• Substituting sounds in words i.e. bat with a /r/ is rat.
• Associating written letters (graphemes) and sounds (phonemes) i.e. the letter o can make a short /o/ sound as in frog or a long /o/ sound as in nose.
• Decoding i.e. recognising sound patterns in words and blending them in order to read words (it is the practical application of general sound/letter association)