Supporting Reading at Home: Phonological and Phonemic Awareness

This is the second of a multi-part series on supporting reading development at home. Today’s topic is Phonological and Phonemic Awareness.

Phonological awareness is a child’s ability to notice and work with spoken sounds.

For example, an emergent reader demonstrates phonological awareness when they notice that the word ‘car’ and ‘cat’ sound different.

Phonological awareness is the foundation for reading and spelling in an alphabetic writing system (e.g. English, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, Korean, etc.). Without developing this skill, emergent readers may experience significant difficulty when learning to read.

Phonemic awareness is a component of phonological awareness but is specifically about children’s ability to notice, think about and work with individual sounds (phoneme) in spoken word. For example, when a child notices that the word ‘hen’ is made up of three distinct sounds, /h/ - /e/ - /n/.

It is important to note that phonological awareness and phonemic awareness are skills demonstrated by noticing sounds and not print.

So, why is phonological awareness important to reading development?

Phonological awareness is a critical process in learning to read any alphabetic writing system. Phonemic awareness, in particular, is a predictor of later outcomes in reading and spelling. According to the National Reading Panel Report (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000), “The level of phonemic awareness that children possess when first beginning reading instruction and their knowledge of letters are the two best predictors of how well they will learn to read during the first two years of formal reading instruction.”

So how can I help my child develop phonological and phonemic awareness skills?

Long before a child learns to read they develop phonological awareness skills. Some of the best ways of support emergent readers develop phonological and phonemic awareness is modelling it, playing games that incorporate sounds and language practice, singing songs or saying nursery rhymes.

Phonological Awareness Skills to Practice:

💛 Rhyme: rhyme awareness and construction

💛Alliteration: discrimination and production

💛Sound and Word Discrimination: notices units of sounds within a sentence, identifies which word is different

💛 Syllabification: syllable segmenting and blending

💛Onset and Rime: blending and segmenting

Phonemic Awareness Skills to Practice:

💛 Individual Phoneme: phoneme isolation, blending and segmenting

💛Syllable Manipulation: syllable deletion and substitution

💛 Phoneme Manipulation: phoneme deletion, addition and substitution