Phonemic AwarenessPrepared by: Mary Grace L. Alilin

What does Phoneme means?

• Phoneme

- a member of the set of the smallest units of speech that serve to distinguish one utterance from another in a language or dialect 

Origin of Phoneme

• The words “Phoneme” comes from the French word phonème, from Greek phōnēmat-, phōnēma which means speech sound, utterance, and from phōnein to sound

What is Phonemic Awareness?• Children need to be taught to hear sounds in

words and words are made up of the smallest parts of sounds or phonemes.

• Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. It is not phonics. It is auditory and does not involve words in print.

• It means recognizing and using individual sounds to create sounds to create words.

• It is the ability to recognize that a spoken word consists of sequence of individual sounds; manipulate individual sounds in the speech stream

Examples of Phonemic Awareness Skills;

Example: Application

Blending What word am I trying to say? Mmmmmop.

Segmentation- first sound isolation

What is the first sound in mop?

Segmentation – last sound isolation

What is last sound in mop?

Segmentation - complete What are all the sounds you hear in mop

Remember

• LYON:

The best predictor of reading difficulty on kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awarenss)

Why is phonemic important?

Three identified reasons

1. It requires readers to notice how letter represents sounds.

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 systemically represented by sounds.

Why is Phonemic difficult?

• Although there are 26 letters in the English language, there are approximately 40 phonemes, or sound units

NOTE• The number of phonemes varies across

sources.

Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings (/f/ as in ph, f ). The sounds units (phonemes) are NOT inherently obvious and must be taught.

The sounds that make up words are “coarcticulated”, that they are not distinctly separate from each other

Critical features of phonemic awareness

• Phonemic awareness is critical component of reading instruction but not an entire program.

• It absolutely needs to be taught, but should only be 10-15 minutes per day of your reading instruction.

• If you focus on just few steps of phonemic awareness, but research has found that blending and segmentation are the two skills that must be taught.

• Instruction must focus on BLENDING and SEGMENTING words at the phoneme, or sound level.

• This is an AUDITORY TASK.

• Phonemic awareness can be best taught and can have better results with small group of children.

• In critical phonemic awareness, pupils should learn:a. Sound Isolation – Example: the first sound in

SUN is /sss/

b. Blending- Example: /sss/-/uuu/-/nnn/ is SUN

c. Segmenting – Example: The sounds in SUN are:

/sss/ - /uuu/-/nnn/

Critical awareness development continuum

Word Recognition

Rhyming

Sentence Segmentation

Syllable Segmentation and Blending

Onset-rime blending and Segmentation

Blending and Segmenting individual phonemes

Phoneme deletion and manipulation

EASY

to

More difficult

~FIN~

Thanks for

Listening. God Bless

You Always!

Prepared by:Mary Grace L. Alilin