Phonemic Awareness: What Is It?

Phonemic Awareness is our ability to recognize and manipulate the smallest units of distinct sounds- phonemes. It is all auditory and has nothing to do with print. It is an important skill to master because it is a prerequisite for successful word recognition and for being able to spell correctly. Phonemic awareness is important to make sense of phonemes.

As you can see in the Children Learning Reading Program reviews, one of the goals of every lesson in this course- Children Learning Reading- is to give your child a stronger phonemic awareness.

Phonemic Awareness VS Phonological Awareness: Are They The Same?

Many people use the term phonemic awareness and phonological awareness interchangeably. But although similarity exists, they are not the same thing.

Phonological awareness is a broad skill that includes phonemic awareness. It is not just limited to identifying sounds, and manipulating them, but it also includes different parts of words and sounds, including syllables, and onsets and rimes. Phonemic awareness is a subset, and much more narrow in that it only refers to the phonemes, such as /d/, /o/, and /g/ in dog.

Is Your Child Too Young (Or Too Old!) To Read?

You can never be too young to start developing phonemic awareness. It is a skill that is incredibly vital to actually read and spell words. While there isn’t a set age when a kid becomes eligible to start reading, according to Jim Yang, the creator of Children Learning Leading Program, you can teach a child how to read starting at any age provided they can speak.

So if your child is speaking then it means, with Jim's Reading Program, you can get them to start reading English quickly and fluently.

Here is a video of Jim's daughter Joy (2 years old), reading away like an adult! You have to truly see it to believe it.

What Does Research Show?

Research has shown phonemic awareness to have a direct correlation with child’s reading proficiency as their age progresses. Here are 5 concepts under phonemic awareness that are often practiced with beginner readers.

• Phonemic identification- The child successfully identifies the common sound in a set of different words. For example, the sound /c/ in “cat”, “cow”, and “car”.

• Phonemic Isolation – With this, the child is able to tell all the different individual phonemes a word is comprised of. For example. They can tell that the first sound in ‘dog” is /d/.

• Phoneme substitution – It’s a strategy where child are able to substitute one phoneme in a word with another. For example, substituting /m/ in
  “mat” with /b/, gives you “bat”.

• Word Segmenting –It is their ability to break a whole word into its individual sounds, or phonemes. For example, when you say “run”, the child can make out that the individual sounds are /r/, /u/, and /n/.

• Blending- Opposite of segmentation, in this when a parent states the individual phonemes, the child can blend them together to form a complete word. For example, when they hear /c/, /a/ and /t/, they know that the word is “cat”.

A study has also shown that a high phonemic awareness before instruction can predict how good the child will be in their ability to read and spell by the grade of the grade. The students who had little to no phonemic awareness in the before starting, in the case of this study, grade 1, showed difficulty in being able to read and spell correctly.

3 Year Old Toddler Reading At Grade 2-3 Level (He Learned to Read using Children Learning Reading Program)

This attests to the fact that it is very essential that you develop phonemic awareness in your child as early as possible.

There is a plethora of research out there specifically showing how important phonemic awareness is to make your child exceptional readers. National Reading Panel states that the skills of blending and segmentation are incredibly important for a young child to understand because books are made up of printed words. When they look at a word, with the help of blending and segmentation, they will be able to segment them first into their respective phonemes, and then blend them together to form a word. Using this technique, they will be able to spell any unfamiliar words they come across.

Reading truly opens up a new window of discovery. As parents and adults, we can’t even think about not being able to read. By just holding that thought for a few seconds in our minds we already know how limited our life would have been if we were unable to read printed text. So many opportunities would have been lost.

It opens up a whole world of fun and exciting things. You will find that being able to read their favorite books, and learning about interesting people and cultures, would literally make both their life colorful. They would be blooming with intelligence because they will be able to learn something new every day.

Jim yang retells one incident of how his 2 and a half year old daughter would use the skill of substitution to be silly and have fun. She would substitute the phoneme, /d/ in “daddy” with /n/, to form the word “nanny”. She would circle around him giggling and saying “nanny, come here….”, or “nanny, come play with me”. Off course, she was aware of the difference between the two words, but it was harmless fun that would entertain both her, and Jim and his wife.

Using the powerful methods of Children Learning Reading program, she was taught to read way before she turned 3. This Reading Program works, which is why it is in high demand, and the testimonials keep getting updated with new little tots finally being able to read like a pro.

Check out Children-Learning-Reading website, to learn more about the easiest and quickest way towards a fluent reader. Click the button below: