Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: what's the difference?



I often refer to phonological and phonemic awareness in conversations with parents. It is important to understand what these skills encompass because they are absolutely critical in reading development. In fact, phonemic awareness makes up one of the five main "pillars" in reading. The other four are: phonics (understanding of the alphabetic principle and assigning sounds to letter names), fluency (appropriate rate), comprehension (understanding and meaning making) and vocabulary. 

Phonological awareness is an umbrella term for all emerging literacy skills that involve hearing various aspects of spoken language. This includes understanding of one-to-one correspondence counting words in a short sentence, breaking words into syllables (or parts), and rhyming. There are two parts to a rhyme: the onset and the rime. The onset is the first sound in isolation and the rime is the rest of the word including a vowel and ending sound(s). For example, /h/-/am/ or /s/-/ock/. All of these tasks are completely auditory and do not involve any written letters (this would be considered phonics). A professor in my Masters' program put it this way- "phonological awareness activities can be done in the dark". 

Phonemic awareness falls into the category of phonological awareness, but it refers to a much more specific skill. Phonemes are the smallest unit of spoken language (i.e. individuals sounds in words). Phonemic awareness includes the ability to identify, discriminate and manipulate sounds. For example, breaking the word "cat" into individual sounds would sound like "/c/ /a/ /t/". Other tasks might be isolating the first, middle, and last sounds or changing one sound at a time to make a different word (a very effective strategy known as "word chaining").

Phonemic awareness is the single most important predictor of reading success. For dyslexics, phonemic awareness is a core deficit in language processing that makes decoding (reading new words) and encoding (spelling) very difficult. The good news is that phonemic awareness can be targeted for strengthening and is a key component to an effective intervention program. I often tell my students that we are working on making their ears stronger in order to hear sounds carefully! There are many activities that you can practice at home as well:

    • Read a Dr. Seuss book aloud and ask your child to identify rhyming words use a hand signal (I usually have students touch their pointer fingers together to indicate something similar)
    • Give your child a word and have them clap the syllables. If they have trouble hearing the word parts, ask them to put a bell or their hand under their chin to hear/feel how many times their jaw drops to identify the number of syllables in the word! 
    • Say a word and a new first sound to practice first phoneme replacement (rhyming). This sounds something like, "rhymes with 'pan', starts with /f/"."
    • Play "I Spy" while driving in the car or at the grocery store. You can ask for the first or last sound in a word and have your child guess what it is. For example, "I spy something that starts with /t/....'tree'"! 



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