Phonemic Awareness Phonemic awareness is the understanding that words can be broken down into smaller speech sounds. Teaching phonemic awareness involves helping students recognize and manipulate different speech sounds. Recommendations for phonemic awareness instruction include teaching children to identify words that begin with the same sounds and words that rhyme, having children practice assem bling different speech sounds into words, and having children practice omitting or replacing specific speech sounds in words (NICHD, 2000; Shanahan et al., 2010a). Children who struggle with phonemic awareness will benefit from instruction on only a few specific tasks at a time (Brown et al., 2021), explicit instruction, and continued practice. Phonics Phonics refers to the knowledge of the correspondence between letters and sounds. While instruction in phonemic awareness is auditory, instruction in phonics includes both auditory and visual components. Research indicates that phonics should be systematically and explicitly taught at an early age—before Grade 1 (Castles et al., 2018; NICHD, 2000). Phonics instruction includes teaching tasks such as identifying letters and their sounds, blending, and recognizing words (Castles et al., 2018; NICHD, 2000). Preschool children may have partial phonics knowledge. For example, they may know some letters’ names and corresponding speech sounds and recognize familiar sounds and letters at the beginnings or ends of words (Ehri, 2005). During kindergarten and Grade 1, children receiving phonics instruction will typically master the alphabetic principle, which includes learning the names of all letters of the alphabet and the common speech sounds they represent (Shanahan et al., 2010a). Providing children with letter tiles or magnetic letters that can be added or removed from words can help make phonics lessons more concrete and less abstract (Brown et al., 2021; Shanahan et al., 2010a). Finally, children who struggle with phonemic awareness will benefit from instruction on only a few specific tasks at a time (Brown et al., 2021). An essential part of phonics education is teaching morphological awareness or recognizing the smallest units of meaningful speech. Throughout kindergarten to Grade 3, children will learn to recognize increasing numbers of morphemes and the letter combinations that represent them (Shanahan et al., 2010a). During these years, children will also learn to use their phonics knowledge to sound out, or decode, increasingly longer and unfamiliar words (Ehri, 2014). Children’s decoding abilities become more and more fluid with time and practice. By the end of Grade 3, typically developing children who have received adequate instruction are likely proficient at decoding and can successfully read grade-level material with few mistakes (ASHA, n.d.a).
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The Science of Reading | What Research Says About Setting Young Readers Up for Success
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