Phonemic awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words. It is the foundation of phonics and reading skills. There are approximately 40 individual speech sounds or phonemes in English represented by over 250 spellings. Phonemic awareness requires explicitly teaching skills like sound blending, segmentation, isolation and manipulation of sounds in words. It should be directly taught for 10-15 minutes daily in small groups. The ability to blend and segment words into individual phonemes is critical for reading development. Phonemic awareness provides readers a way to sound out new words using letter-sound relationships.

1. Phonemic
Awareness
Prepared by: Mary Grace L. Alilin

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. • 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

6. 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

7. 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)

8. Why is phonemic
important?

9. 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.

10. Why is Phonemic difficult?
• Although there are 26 letters in the English
language, there are approximately 40
phonemes, or sound units

11. 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

12. Critical features of
phonemic awareness

13. • 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.

14. • 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.

15. • 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/

16. 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

17. ~FIN~

18. Thanks for
Listening.
God Bless
You Prepared by:
Mary Grace L. Alilin