Phonemic Awareness
What is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to:
1. Hear sounds that make up words
2. See relationships between sounds
3. Alter and rearrange sounds to create new words
Components of phonemic Awareness:
• Rhyming—Identify and form rhyming words
• Sound matching—Hear and identify similar word patterns
• Syllable counting—Identify the number of syllables in spoken words
• Syllable splitting—Identify onsets and rimes
• Phoneme blending—Orally blend individual sounds to form a word
• Phoneme Isolation—Identify the beginning, middle and ending sounds of a word
• Phoneme counting—Count the number of phonemes in a word
• Phoneme segmenting—Break apart a word into individual sounds (phonemes)
• Phoneme addition—Add a beginning, middle, or ending sound to a word
• Phoneme deletion—Omit the beginning, middle or ending sound from a word
• Phoneme
substitution—Substitute a
new sound for the beginning, middle or ending of a
word.
Phonemic Awareness Vs. Phonics
1. Children first become aware of spoken words, the syllables, then onset and rimes and finally individual sounds.
2. Phonemic awareness focuses on sound units (phonemes) while phonics focuses on the association of the written symbol.





