What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness (awareness of sound) is the ability to hear and play with the individual sound of language to create new words using those sounds in different ways. This usually occurs within the natural course of a child's development. 

A Phoneme is the smallest sound segment in spoken language that has a meaning. For example: - A word ”CAT" there are phoneme. 


Phonemic Awareness

Why Phonemic Awareness is Important?

Phonemic Awareness is Important for: -

1. It requires readers to notice how letters represent sounds. It primes readers for print.

2. It gives readers a way to approach sounding out and reading new words.

3. It helps readers understand the alphabetic principle (that the letters in words are systematically represented by sounds). 


Phonemes


Skills of Phonemic Awareness

1. Isolation: - Students recognize different sounds in a word. For example: - ‘Trap’ starts with /t/. It ends with /p/

2. Blending: - Students listen to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and then combine the sounds to form a word. For example: - /t/ + /r/ +/a/ + /p/ = 'trap'

3. Division: - Students break a word into individual sounds and count how many sounds they hear. For example: - ‘Trap’ = /t/ + /r/ + /a/ + /p/ = 4 sounds

4. Removal: - Students remove a sound word from a word to make a new word. T For example: - trap - tap

5. Addition: - Students form a new word by adding a sound word to an existing word. For example: - Mesh strap

6. Substitution: - Students substitute one phoneme for another to form a new word. For example: - trap – travel.