Should phonemic awareness tasks include letters? Read on to find out the most effective way to combine phonics and phonemic awareness for early reading success! If you are a parent, teacher, or administrator in any role that involves early childhood students, elementary students, or reading intervention in the upper grades, this post is for you.
First, we’ll review the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness and where phonics fits into the picture. Then, we’ll discuss the importance of developing strong phonemic awareness skills. Lastly, we’ll discuss a powerful tool for combining phonemic awareness with phonics in one high-impact activity.
What is phonological awareness?
Phonological awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate speech sounds at the sentence, word, syllable, onset/rime, and phoneme (single sound) levels. Examples of phonological awareness activities include counting words in a sentence, deleting a syllable from a compound word, and changing the first sound (onset) in a word to come up with a list of rhyming words, like mat, hat, and bat.
What is phonemic awareness?
Phonemic awareness is under the umbrella of phonological awareness. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound, so phonemic awareness is the ability to notice and manipulate these smallest units of sound. Examples of phonemic awareness activities include blending four sounds into a word, deleting the /r/ sound from the word grass to make the word gas, and changing the last sound in a word to make a new word, like changing card to cart.
What about phonics?
Phonics is a system of reading that is based on the alphabetic principle, which states that letters are used to represent speech sounds. Phonological and phonemic awareness are auditory skills that we can practice “with our eyes closed,” while phonics involves the visual input of letters.
How do poor phonological awareness skills impact reading skills?
Phonological awareness skills have a significant impact on the development of reading skills during the crucial early stages of becoming a fluent reader. According to Kilpatrick (2015), “Every point in a child’s development of word-level reading is affected by phonological awareness skills.”
In simplest terms, if you want a child to read and spell all the sounds within a word, then you’ll need that child to hear all the sounds within the word.
Two specific phonemic awareness skills are key for building early reading and spelling skills:
- Blending individual sounds into words is an essential skill for decoding (reading).
- Segmenting a word into its individual sounds is an essential skill for encoding (spelling).
Scenario: Using phonemic awareness to read and spell
Let’s imagine we are working with a young boy named Alex. He is trying to read the word brag. He knows the primary sound for all letters so he begins by producing each sound: “/b/ /r/ /a/ /g/” but then he announces that the word is break. Alex may need to practice blending phonemes into words.
Later in the day, Alex is trying to spell the word mask. He is unable to segment the word into its four individual phonemes. He sounds out the word as best as he can and writes the letters mack. Because Alex could not hear that /s/ sound when he segmented the word into phonemes, he could not write a letter to represent it. Alex may need to practice segmenting phonemes within words.
These are examples of phonemic awareness weaknesses that impact Alex at the word level. Now picture Alex trying to read a grade-level text or trying to express his ideas in writing. In addition to his reading and spelling accuracy at the single word level, his reading fluency, reading comprehension, and writing fluency will also be impacted by his foundational weakness in phonemic awareness.
Can we help children improve their phonological awareness skills?
Absolutely! Wendling and Mather (2012) assert that “the relationship between phonological awareness and reading ability is reciprocal and bidirectional: as phonological awareness develops, reading improves and vice versa.”
Kilpatrick (2016) shares that approximately 60-70% of children will naturally develop phoneme awareness without explicit instruction. The students who do not naturally develop it will need direct instruction. The good news is that improving phonological awareness requires a relatively modest investment of time.
Multiple researchers agree that short daily practice sessions (two to ten minutes per day of direct instruction, depending on which source you consult) have a positive impact. The National Reading Panel’s 2000 report Teaching Children to Read summarized the research by stating that effective phonemic awareness training takes anywhere from 5 to 18 total hours.
Let’s do some math: If you spend ten minutes a day directly working on phonemic awareness, it could take anywhere from 30 school days to 108 school days for typically developing students to gain adequate skills. That may sound like a long time but if you remember that improving phonemic awareness skills may be the key to unlocking a child’s reading success, then ten minutes a day for part of the school year is 100% worth it!
Should I include letters when I teach phonemic awareness?
You may have heard the phrase, “You can do phonemic awareness in the dark,” which suggests that you only need your ears and not your eyes. A couple of years ago, science of reading advocates had heated debates on social media. Some people believed that phonemic awareness tasks should only be done auditorily, while others argued that we should include letters. The first group argued that once you add letters, the activity becomes phonics instead of phonemic awareness.
Who is right? It’s not that simple, so let’s dive in.
To help differentiate between phonics and phonemic awareness, Kilpatrick said, “You can do phoneme awareness with your eyes closed, but you cannot do phonics with your eyes closed.” While this is true, it doesn’t mean that phonics and phonemic awareness are mutually exclusive, or that we should only teach phonemic awareness in a purely auditory way. While adding letters to a phonemic awareness task does make it also a phonics task, it does not remove phonemic awareness skills from the task. It only means that the student is working on phonics and phonemic awareness at the same time.
Louisa Moats, author of Speech To Print: Language Essentials for Teachers, recognizes that there are circumstances that require students to work on phonemic awareness in a solely auditory way, but not for a long period of time: “use letters and graphemes to represent sounds as soon as young students have a clear concept of what they represent.” Younger students should participate in oral-only phonemic awareness activities but once they understand that letters are used to represent sounds and have started to learn some letter sounds, we should be including letters in our phonemic awareness instruction.
Further support for including letters with phonemic awareness instruction comes from the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, “Teaching Children to Read.” The report states numerous times that we should combine phonemic awareness with phonics with assertions such as, “Teaching students to manipulate phonemes with letters yields larger effects than teaching students without letters, not surprisingly because letters help children make the connection between PA and its application to reading.” Another section states, “Teaching children to manipulate phonemes with letters created effect sizes almost twice as large as teaching children without letters.”
I attempted to count how many times the NRP noted that phonemic awareness instruction is more effective with letters, but I quickly lost track! So, long story short: scientific research clearly supports the inclusion of letters in phonemic awareness instruction.
Using word chains to combine phonics and phonemic awareness
One way to combine phonics and phonemic awareness is by completing word ladders or word chains. Word chains are a high-impact activity, meaning they offer several benefits in one simple activity. Word chains require students to practice several phonemic awareness skills in one activity: segmenting, blending, substituting, adding, and deleting. The activity also includes the phonics skills of decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) because letters are involved. If that’s not enough to convince you, word chaining also encourages the orthographic mapping process! When students pay careful attention to the individual sounds within words and the letter(s) used to represent them, they are more likely to map the words for long-term retrieval. When words are mapped for long-term retrieval, they become part of the student’s sight vocabulary, meaning the student can recognize the word automatically.
Reading Rockets supports the use of phoneme manipulation tasks (adding, substituting, and deleting sounds), which are practiced when students complete word chains:
Manipulating sounds “is the pinnacle skill [of phonemic awareness]. Keep in mind that poor phonological awareness is the most common area of weakness for struggling readers. Students who master this skill are on a solid footing for reading success.”
Paws and Spell: Online Word Chain Activity
In the summer of 2023, I was planning lessons for my tutoring clients. I tried to find an online game the kids could use between their sessions with me. Knowing that word chains are a high-impact reading activity, I looked for an interactive version. Unfortunately, all I could find were activities where:
- the word lists jumped from one phonics skill to another
- picture cues required extensive vocabulary knowledge to figure out the next word
- images and music distracted from the task
- the fonts were hard to read
So I asked, “What if I made it myself?” I hired a game developer and dove in! There were several moments over the last year when I thought I was crazy for attempting this project, but I’m proud to say that Paws and Spell has been built, tested, and officially released!
The concept is simple: students listen to the audio cue and then drag letter tiles to change one letter at a time to create new words. Each word chain includes ten words. Here’s an example from the CVC words with digraphs level: wish, dish, dash, mash, mesh, met, mat, chat, sat, sack.
There are 11 skills-based categories. Each category includes 10 word chains, for a total of 110 word chains. The categories are:
- CVC Words
- CVC Words with Digraphs
- Bonus Letters/ FLOSS Rule
- Initial Consonant Blends
- Final Consonant Blends
- Initial and Final Consonant Blends
- Open and Closed Syllables
- Silent e
- R-Controlled Vowels
- Long Vowel Teams
- Diphthongs and Other Tricky Vowel Teams
Try the sample word chains!
Want to give Paws and Spell a try? We’re offering five word chains for you to test out. If you love it (and we think you will!), you can snag a subscription to unlock all 110 word chains. As a thank you for reading this blog, you can use code KRLBLOG24 at checkout for a 20% discount on your subscription.
If you want to learn more about using Paws and Spell to practice phonemic awareness with letters, you can read my last blog, which will answer all of your questions!
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Sources:
These sources may contain affiliate links.
Kilpatrick, David A. Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Hoboken, New Jersey, Wiley, 2015.
Kilpatrick, David A. Equipped for Reading Success: A Comprehensive, Step-By-Step Program for Developing Phoneme Awareness and Fluent Word Recognition. Syracuse, NY, Casey & Kirsch Publishers, 2016.
Mather, Nancy, and Barbara J. Wendling. Essentials of Dyslexia Assessment and Intervention. J. Wiley, 2012.National Reading Panel (U.S.) and National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.). Report of the National Reading Panel: Teaching Children to Read : An Evidence-based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction. U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000.
Moats, L. (2020). Speech to print: Language Essentials for Teachers. Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co.
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