What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is:

1. the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).
2. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.
3. fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.
4. essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system
5. a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.

"The best predictor of reading difficulty in kindergarten or first grade is the inability to segment words and syllables into constituent sound units (phonemic awareness)" (Lyon, 1995; see References).

What is a Phoneme?	Different Linguistic Units: Large to Small
Phonemes are the smallest units composing spoken language. (National Reading Panel, 2000)	Sentences: The sun shone brightly. Word: sun Syllables: sun, sun-shine, sun-ny Onset-rime: s-un, s-unshine, s-unny Phoneme: s-u-n, s-u-n-sh-i-ne; s-u-nn-y
Sun has 3 phonemes: s....u....n