Phonemic awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, distinguish, and manipulate the individual sounds, or phonemes, that comprise spoken words. Recognized as a vital component of reading instruction, it falls under the broader category of phonological awareness, which also includes understanding syllables and rimes. The significance of phonemic awareness has been emphasized by literacy experts as essential for young learners in developing decoding skills, reading comprehension, and spelling abilities. Since the 1980s, educational approaches to reading have primarily focused on two methods: phonics, which teaches the relationship between sounds and their written forms, and whole language, which encourages learning words in context. Research shows that combining elements from both methods can enhance reading instruction. Current frameworks, including the Common Core Standards, advocate for foundational skills like phonemic awareness as part of a comprehensive reading strategy. As new technologies and teaching methods emerge, there are ongoing discussions about the most effective ways to teach phonemic awareness, especially for students with unique learning needs, such as those with dyslexia.
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Subject Terms
Phonemic awareness
A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit, that is, the basic unit of sound; all spoken words are made up of one or more phonemes. Phonemic awareness, first discussed by education and literacy researcher Jeanne Chall in the 1960s, is the ability to hear, distinguish, and manipulate the phonemes that make up each word and the ability to identify a word on the basis of its phonemes. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness, the ability to identify the syllables, onsets and rimes (initial and following sounds of a word), and phonemes of each word. Phonemic awareness is the part of phonics, a method of reading instruction to teach the correspondence of sounds in oral language (comprising one or more phonemes) and graphemes, the spelling patterns of words in written language. Many experts in early literacy who advocate the use of phonics assert that phonemic awareness is critical to children’s decoding and reading comprehension, as well as spelling skills.
Overview
Since the 1980s, reading instruction has been characterized by two methods: phonics and whole language. Phonics teaches emerging readers to decode written words by examining their sound components, namely long and short vowels (for example, the a in cake and cat, respectively), consonants, and the various sounds of two adjacent vowels or consonants. Phonics should not be confused with phonetics, which is the study of the sounds of human speech. Whole language is a philosophy of teaching reading that emphasizes that students learn individual words within the context of the written work.
During the 1980s, the “reading wars” erupted over which of these two methods of instruction educators should follow. In 1990, Marilyn Jager Adams argued that both methods were important for effective reading instruction, a position most educators now hold. She stated that these reading wars posed a false dichotomy because true whole language instruction includes at least some degree of phonics to help students decode unfamiliar words. Adams described five levels of phonemic awareness: the ability to hear rhymes and alliteration, the ability to perform oddity tasks (that is, differentiating among words for rhyme and alliteration), the ability to blend and split syllables, the ability to perform phonemic segmentation (that is, differentiating and identifying the phonemes in a word), and the ability to manipulate phonemes (that is, adding, taking away, or substituting a phoneme to create a new word). Other research shows that phonemic awareness is the best means of predicting early acquiring reading ability. A 2000 report by the National Reading Panel reviewed the research and became the basis for US Department of Education policy governing standards for early language arts instruction. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and the International Reading Association (IRA) are the primary professional organizations for teaching early reading and literacy in the United States; both organizations recommend a balanced approach in reading instruction that acknowledges both the importance of reading comprehension and enjoyment and discrete decoding skills. The 2012 Common Core Standards for English Language Literacy stresses skills comprehension and college and career preparedness. However, decoding skills such as phonemic awareness fall under foundational reading skills. The Common Core Standards introductory statement acknowledges that foundational skills are not an end unto themselves, but they are an important part of comprehensive and effective reading instruction. Curricula should be differentiated because students enter school with highly varied degrees of reading preparedness.
Over the course of the twenty-first century, new technology was developed to aid reading instruction, including interactive games and apps that supported phonemic awareness development. Many teachers found success using such tools to make learning more engaging for students. New approaches to phonemic awareness instruction were also developed, including a multisensory approach that incorporated visual, auditory, and kinesthetic teaching methods into phonemic concept instruction. In the 2020s, new research emerged that criticized how phonemic awareness was being taught in schools, claiming that too much emphasis was placed on auditory training and that teachers saw better results when sounds and letters were combined in reading instruction. Researchers also advised that teachers should limit the amount of phonemic awareness instruction taught to young children each day, to focus on vocabulary, read-alouds, and other important skills. Meanwhile, others acknowledged that students with disabilities, such as those with dyslexia, would benefit from increased auditory training.
Bibliography
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