What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness has been shown through research to be the single most powerful predictor of future reading ability in beginning readers.

Phonemic awareness is a term that means 'awareness of the individual speech sounds of language'. The term comes from the word 'phoneme', which is the technical term for the brain’s representation of a single speech sound in spoken language. That's easy to remember if you know that the word 'phoneme' comes from the word 'phone', which means 'sound'!

For example, what are the speech sounds in the word 'spin'? Remember, we are not talking about the letters in the word, as in "s (ess), p (pea), i (eye), n (en)", but the speech sounds made by the mouth. Click or tap on the image below, then move your mouse or your finger over the numbers to hear the speech sounds:  

Understanding that the word "spin" is made up of these speech sounds is an example of phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to be aware of and to perform tasks using individual speech sounds in spoken words. For example, if you take the /s/ out of the word above, what is the new word? 

The ability to join speech sounds together to make a word (a skill called blending) and the ability to divide words into their separate speech sounds (a skill called segmentation) are two of the most important phonemic awareness skills for students learning to read and spell.

Why is phonemic awareness so important?

Phonemic awareness has been shown through research to be the single most powerful predictor of future reading ability in beginning readers. Difficulty with phonemic awareness is a hallmark of the struggling reader. 

Strong phonemic awareness skills give students learning to read an advantage in understanding the relationships between the speech sounds of the language (phonemes) and the letters and letter patterns that typically represent them (graphemes). This advantage helps students to learn to decode written language when reading unfamiliar words (it also helps students to encode words when spelling).

The role of phonemic awareness and its relationship with phonemes, graphemes and letters may be summarised using a 'Word Burger" analogy. We have created a free infographic illustrating the relationship between phonemes, graphemes and letters for you to view and download HERE.