Decoding and Word Recognition

Phonemic Awareness

Introduction

Phonemic Awareness is defined as the ability to listen, identify and manipulate individual sounds in the words that are spoken. It is very important to understand that phonemic awareness and phonics are not the same. Phonemic awareness helps students to learn spelling of words and improve reading and comprehension skills of students. There are different activities that are used in order to create phonemic awareness among students. These activities include identifying and categorizing sounds, blending sounds to form words, adding or deleting sounds to form new words and substituting sounds to form new words. These are the basic activities which are used to help create maximum awareness of phonemics among children.

Children who are unable to ear face difficulty to learn how to relate phonemes with graphemes when words are written in front of them. These children need more emphasis to make them learn and identify the relation between different letters and identify the sound of different words. These children could work on recognizing these words and show that they have phonemic awareness through several ways. These ways provide the teacher to understand the mental stability of children and make them learn according to their capabilities (Danahy, 2003).

Phonics instructions focus on teaching children the relationship between individual sounds of spoken language and letters of written language. Phonics instructions help children to remember reading words that they have once learned. Phonics instructions also help children to recognize words they are familiar with correctly and decode new words. It is important to understand that there is a difference between phonemic awareness and phonic instructions.

Key Concepts of Phonemic Awareness and Phonic Instructions

There are twelve key concepts related to phonemic awareness and phonic instructions according to the National Reading Panel publication that play a vital role in the learning and ...