Phonological and phonemic awareness: Help a struggling reader with sounds

Phonological awareness is the foundational ability to recognise and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words, serving as a critical precursor to successful reading and writing. This comprehensive overview examines the hierarchical nature of sound sensitivity, beginning with broad skills such as rhyming and syllable identification before transitioning into the more granular discipline of phonemic awareness.

By understanding these distinctions, educators and parents can better support learners in developing the auditory processing skills necessary for decoding and encoding text. The article provides a detailed breakdown of the phonological continuum, practical instructional strategies, and the research-based significance of phoneme manipulation in predicting long-term literacy outcomes.

Readers will gain clarity on how to move from large sound units to the smallest units of speech, ensuring a robust transition into formal phonics instruction.

Key Takeaways

• Phonological awareness functions as an umbrella term encompassing broad oral language skills from rhyming to individual phoneme manipulation.
• Phonemic awareness is the most advanced sub-skill focusing exclusively on isolating and blending the smallest units of sound.
• Mastery of these auditory skills is the strongest early predictor of future reading achievement and spelling proficiency in children.
• Effective instruction follows a developmental continuum moving from larger sound units like syllables to sophisticated phoneme substitution and deletion.
• Phonological skills are entirely oral and should be established as a prerequisite or accompaniment to formal letter-sound phonics training.

Understanding the phonological continuum

The journey toward literacy begins long before a child identifies a single letter on a page. It starts with the ear. Phonological awareness is the broad awareness of the sound structure of spoken language.

It is a multi-layered skill set that allows a person to “play” with sounds. At its most basic level, this involves noticing that sentences are made of words and that some words, like cat and hat, sound similar at the end.

As a learner progresses, they begin to perceive smaller “chunks” of sound. This includes:

Word awareness: Recognising individual words within a spoken sentence.

Syllable awareness: The ability to count or “clap out” the rhythmic beats in a word (e.g., hap-py).

Onset and rime: Breaking a single-syllable word into its initial consonant sound (onset) and the following vowel/consonant string (rime), such as /s/ – /un/.

The vital role of phonemic awareness

While phonological awareness is the “big picture”, phonemic awareness is the “zoom lens”. It is the specific ability to focus on and manipulate phonemes—the smallest units of sound that change the meaning of a word. For example, changing the /b/ in bat to a /p/ creates pat.

Research, including the findings of the National Reading Panel, consistently identifies phonemic awareness as a core pillar of reading success. Without the ability to hear that the word fish is composed of three distinct sounds (/f/ /i/ /sh/), a student will struggle to map those sounds to the letters F-I-S-H when they begin phonics.

Core phonemic skills

Isolation: Identifying where a sound occurs (e.g., “What is the first sound in dog?”).

Blending: Pulling individual sounds together to form a word (/k/ /a/ /t/ becomes cat).

Segmentation: Breaking a word into its component sounds (stop becomes /s/ /t/ /o/ /p/).

Manipulation: Adding, deleting, or substituting sounds to create new words.

Implementation in early education

Instruction should be frequent, brief, and multisensory. Since these are oral skills, they do not require books or paper. Educators often use “Elkonin Boxes” or physical tokens to represent sounds, helping students see the “space” a sound occupies in a word without needing to know the alphabet yet.

However, the transition to phonics, the relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes), is the ultimate goal. Once a child can comfortably segment a word like sun into three sounds, introducing the letters S, U, and N makes the abstract concept of reading concrete and manageable.

When you listen to speakers of a foreign language that you do not understand, you hear a sequence of sounds that you perceive as gibberish. This is because you lack phonological and phonemic awareness of that language.

A struggling reader of the English language faces a similar situation. While the child speaks and understands the spoken language, there are issues with reading and writing it because he or she does not have the phonological and phonemic awareness skills required for doing so.

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What is phonological and phonemic awareness?

Phonological awareness is the umbrella over the many sounds made in speech. These sounds are sentences that are segmented into words, syllables, onset-rime and phoneme.

Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness. It is being aware of each sound made in a single word. There are 8 skills needed to be a proficient reader which we look at in more detail later on.

Phonics and the importance of phonological and phonemic awareness

Phonics is the cornerstone of many modern reading methods. This is the representation of sounds with writing. A reader with phonological and phonemic awareness problems would have more issues with making sense of the written word.

If a student cannot tell the difference between the long ‘a’ sound in ‘weigh’, short ‘e’ sound in ‘their’, and long ‘i’ sound in ‘height’, then learning that the digraph ‘ei’ represents all three sounds in some will be confusing.

Phonics proved highly successful in building foundational reading skills, allowing children to tackle unfamiliar words with confidence. They learn that the long vowel ‘a’ and the short sound ‘ah’ can be written as:

a-e   ape

ai      bait

ay     day

ei      weigh

ey     obey

a       apple

Sharpen phonological and phonemic awareness skills

The sentence below contains all the items you need to help sharpen your student’s phonological and phonemic awareness skills. This will give you a start in your reading intervention programme.

StanisthepolicemanbytheredvanwhoiswritingaticketforthemanwiththebigheadwhosaidhejustgotpaidandcametoPortofSpainforbreakfast.

Word awareness

Ask your student to separate the string of sounds in the sentence above into words. You must hear:

Stan is the policeman by the red van who is writing a ticket for the man with the big head who said he just got paid and came to Port-of-Spain for breakfast.

Blending words

Pull out the compound words in the sentence and discuss. Ask what words are blended together and why are they blended?

policeman – police and man mean a man is a police officer

breakfast – break and fast mean breaking the fasting period between night and morning

Port-of-Spain – Port, of, and Spain mean a port for ships to dock in a Spanish colony

Word segmentation

Count the words that make up the compound word. Clap and count aloud when saying:

police, man – 2 words

break, fast – 2 words

Port, of, Spain – 3 words

Deletion of words

Remove words in the compound word:

Say policeman without the word police – ‘man’

Say breakfast without the word fast – ‘break’

Say Port-of-Spain without Port and of – ‘Spain’

Syllable awareness

Look at parts of a word.

Blending syllables

Make a word by blending parts of a word:

ticket – tick, et

Syllable segmentation

Let your student clap and count the word parts:

ticket – tic, ket

Deletion of syllables

Say ticket without the et:

tick

Onset-rime awareness

The initial sound in a word made up of one or more consonants is the onset. The sounds that follow that starts with a vowel is the rime. When the rime is the same as those in other words, they rhyme.

Stan, man, van

However, not all words that rhyme have rime. This means after the initial sound you hear the same sound but the letters that represent it are different.

red, head, said

Also, some words have same rime but do not rhyme. This means the letters after the initial one looks the same as another word but do not sound the same.

said, paid

Rhyme recognition

Ask your student to spot words that rhyme despite spelling:

Stan, man, van

red, head, said

Rhyme generation

What rhymes with man? – Stan, van

What rhymes with red? – said, head

Categorisation of rhymes

Group some words and ask which one should not be in the category.

Stan, van, red, man – red

Blending of onset rimes

Blend the words with onset rime:

St-an, v-an, m-an

Segmentation of words that rhyme

Clap and count the parts of the word:

St-an – 2 parts

v-an – 2 parts

m-an – 2 parts

Deletion of initial sound from rime

Ask your student to say:

Stan without ‘St’ – an

van without the ‘v’ – an

man without the ‘m’ – an

Phoneme awareness

Isolation of phonemes

Isolate the first, middle, and last sound in words:

van – v-a-n

red – r-e-d

head – h-ea-d

said – s-ai-d

paid – p-ai-d

Identification of same sounds

Identifying same sounds in words shows awareness of alliteration and assonance.

Alliteration: What word has the same initial consonant sound as paid?

big, policeman, breakfast (policeman)

Assonance: What word has the same vowel sound as said?

paid, man, red, came (red)

Categorisation of same sounds

Ask your student to point out the word that is different in the group:

policeman, paid, big, Port-of-Spain (big)

Blending of sounds

Blend individual sounds in a word:

van – v-a-n

man – m-a-n

red – r-e-d

Segmentation of sounds

Clap and count the sounds in a word:

big – b-i-g has 3 sounds

Spain – s-p-ai-n has 4 sounds

Deletion of sounds

Say Spain without the ‘S’

pain

Addition of sounds

Add ‘S’ to pain

Spain

Substitution of sounds

Substitute the ‘v’ in van with ‘m’.

man

Conclusion

This guide will definitely have your student working on improving his or her phonological and phonemic awareness skills. Use flashcards, worksheets and games to display as many words as possible to practise phonological and phonemic awareness. Your student would soon be decoding words proficiently and improving reading skills in no time.

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See also:

2 Letter words: Why readers struggle with them

5 Reading assessment topics to give proper diagnosis

Sentence: 5 tips to writing perfect word order

Decoding: Focus on 6 steps when sounding out words

Consonants – digraphs, trigraphs, hard, soft, blends, silent sounds

Vowels – syllables, digraphs, trigraphs, long, short and silent

Spelling rules for ch, tch, ck, k, oi, oy, ou, ow, ie, ei

Affixes – rules for adding prefixes and suffixes

Homophones – words that have same sound