Why is Phonemic Awareness important?

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is important because:

• It requires readers to notice how letters represent sounds. It primes readers for print.
  
  
• It gives readers a way to approach sounding out and reading new words.
  
  
• It helps readers understand the alphabetic principle (that the letters in words are systematically represented by sounds).

Phonemic Awareness (PA) is difficult because:

• Although there are 26 letters in the English language, there are approximately 40 phonemes, or sound units, in the English language. (NOTE: the number of phonemes varies across sources.)
  
  
• Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings (e.g., /f/ as in ph, f, gh, ff).
  
  
• The sound units (phonemes) are not inherently obvious and must be taught. The sounds that make up words are "coarticulated;" that is, they are not distinctly separate from each other.