4.1.

Phonological And Phonemic

Awareness
Let’s explore phonological awareness and phonemic awareness. You may not be aware of these terms. You’ll
soon find out, though, that they’re not difficult to grasp.
Lots of people, including some teachers, get a bit confused with these terms. Some teachers put all of this
under the heading ‘Pronunciation’ but, as we will see, this is wrong.
So, take your time with this Section and see if you can grasp the differences between these elements.

4.1.1. Phonological Awareness

Although your focus in the initial stages will be on helping your learners to grasp the meaning of words, you
need to help them become aware of the sounds of words.
Not only will they be better able to produce the right sounds for words that they hear and become familiar with
but also this attention to the sounds of words will prepare them well for later success with reading and writing.
Phonological awareness is the ability to focus on the sounds of the language. It’s about making your learners
aware that words are made up of individual and different-sized sounds.
You need to help them to improve their ability in this, bit by bit. It can be a bit challenging for some younger
learners, but it needs to be done.
So how do you promote this phonological awareness?
Here is a practical route to follow. Stick to this order as best as you can:

1. Do lots and lots of listening games that focus your learners’ attention on words.
2. Move on to rhyming practice, e.g. rhymes, songs, and poems, to draw their attention to the sounds at
the end of words
3. Then, focus on alliteration (e.g. A big, bad bug bit the little beetle.) which will draw their attention to
the sounds at the beginning of words. Look out for stories and rhymes and songs that will help them
with this.
4. Building on what they have learned in the rhyming and alliteration work, focus on and practise the
comparison and contrast of sounds at the beginning and end of words.
5. Move on to sentence segmenting, helping them to be aware of, and counting, the number of words in
sentences.
6. Then focus on syllable segmenting and blending, clapping and counting the syllables in words and
then blending (combining) them back together into words. Remember: A syllable is a part of a word
that is pronounced with one uninterrupted sound. For example:
 lion: li-on (two syllables); clap and count the syllables li-on, li-on, li-on then blend back
to lion; help them with the pronunciation at the same time
 elephant: el-e-phant (three syllables); clap and count the syllables el-e-phant, el-e-phant, ele-
phant and then blend back to elephant; help them with the pronunciation at the same time
If you are unsure about syllables, check out http://www.howmanysyllables.com
7. Move on to onset and rime, dividing one-syllable words by their initial consonant sound and all their
other sounds. You can usually split a syllable into two distinct parts:

1. The onset. This consists of the initial consonant or consonant blend.

 2. The rime. This consists of the vowel and any final consonants.
So, in the word cat, c is the onset and at is the rime. So, following on from cat, you could
then use m-at, s-at, b-at, etc.

8. Focus on phoneme deletion and phoneme substitution of sounds in words. A phoneme is each
meaningful sound in a language. Here is an example of phoneme deletion: Now, class, let’s look at the
word smile. Smile. Take away the /s/ sound. What have we got? That’s right, mile. Smile without
the /s/ sound is mile. Here is an example of phoneme substitution: Now, class, I saw a bug. Let’s look
at the word bug. What sound does it end with? That’s right – /g/. Now, change the /g/ sound to /n/.
What’s the new word? That’s right – bun.
9. Then focus on phoneme blending – blending individual sounds. The learners listen to a sequence of
separately spoken phonemes and then combine the phonemes to form a word. Then they write and
read the word, e.g. /b/, /i/, /g/ to make big.
10. Focus on phoneme segmentation, breaking down words into individual phonemes. Your learners
break a word into its separate sounds, e.g. breaking down grab into /g/, /r/, /a/, /b/, saying each sound
as they tap out or count it. Then they write and read the word.
11. Then help them to move to overall phoneme manipulation, replacing individual sounds in a
word. Phoneme manipulation includes deleting phonemes from words, adding phonemes to words,
blending phonemes to make words, segmenting words into phonemes and substituting one phoneme
for another to create a new word.

Strategies to promote phonological awareness

Here’s what you must do (and what you mustn’t do):

1. Ensure It Is An Integral Part Of Communication

Learners will do well with their phonological awareness so long as it is not run in isolation, and you ensure it
becomes an integral part of communication in the classroom. Don’t just suddenly bring up a word out of thin
air and start to analyse it.

2. Do Not Aim For Perfection

No, the more realistic goals for you are that your learners:

 develop intelligibility (the degree to which the learner’s speech can be understood in different
language situations)
 increase communication ability
 develop increased self-confidence in speaking the language and listening and understanding the
language

3. Plan The Phonological Awareness Experiences

Don’t just do these as they come up. You have a route to follow, as outlined above. So, plan what you’ll do
when and how.
The activities need to be fun. Always add a bit of fun to keep up their motivation and participation.
It’s so easy to promote enjoyment and fun when dealing with younger learners. For example, when guiding
them through alliteration, you could easily change a song they love, such as Twinkle, Twinkle Little
Star into Binkle, Binkle, Bittle Bar. They’ll find it funny but will be learning at the same time.
Utilise all the activities they are already familiar with. There’s no need to try and introduce some unfamiliar
activity. Their focus may be more on understanding the unfamiliar activity than the phonological awareness
you are striving for.
So, use experiences they are familiar with, e.g. singing songs, rhyming games, chanting nursery rhymes,
poems, etc. Just adapt what’s already there.
However, don’t just focus on games and activities. Use familiar routines to practise and recycle their
phonological awareness. For example:

 Everyone whose name begins with the llll sound, bring your books to me. Remember this: you must
emphasise the sound and not the letter name.
 When lined up outside the class, you could say: All those whose name begins with a ssss sound come
in first. Next, those with a tttt sound. Each time you would vary the order. You could also do this when
they leave your class.

Think about how you can involve parents/caregivers in this. In some countries, learners’ parents/caregivers
may not know a single word in English. However, depending on the cost and the effort you are prepared to put
into it, you could record this week’s sounds onto copies of CDs or memory sticks that the children take home
with them and the parents/caregivers support them in the sound activity practice.
This won’t be too challenging for non-English speaking parents/caregivers.
Generally, you are best to start with phonological awareness activities and then move on to phonemic
awareness activities. But sometimes, it will be apt to interlink the two at the same time.

4.1.2. Phonemic Awareness

Phonemic awareness relates to the correspondences between letters or groups of letters and the sounds they
represent.
If the learners do not first become phonologically aware, later instruction in phonemic awareness
and decoding (breaking up a word into sounds) will not make sense.
Learners with phonemic awareness can break up words into their different sounds. They can join sounds
together to make words.
It helps beginning readers to see the links between the spoken and written words. Once they grasp this, they
can recognise familiar words quickly and can have a go at figuring out unfamiliar words.
Research shows that progress in learning to read depends on how much phonological and phonemic awareness
a learner has.
Remember this: Phonemic awareness aims to help learners see the correspondence between letters and sounds
so that when they see a letter or sometimes a group of letters, they learn that these symbols (letters) represent
speech sounds heard in words.
Children can demonstrate that they have phonemic awareness in several ways, including:

 recognising words, in a set of words, which start with the same sound (e.g. bell, bike, and boy all have
/b/ at the beginning)
  identifying and speaking the first or last sound in a word (e.g. the beginning sound of dog is /d/; the
ending sound of bit is /t/.)
 linking, or blending, the separate sounds in a word to say the word (/m/, /a/, /p/ = map.)

When learners break up a word into sounds, this is called decoding. The end goal is for the learner to join the
individual sounds in a word and then utter the word as a whole.
Inexperienced teachers get confused between phonemic awareness and pronunciation and often use the
word pronunciation as a label for all aspects of sound production in the classroom. This is wrong.
Phonemic awareness is the teaching of sounds as part of decoding letters in words to decipher the individual
sounds.
Pronunciation is different. It refers to how a person articulates specific sounds.
Decoding – the deciphering of individual words – is of immense importance. In English, decoding can be
tricky due to the exceptions there are between sound and symbol correspondence. It differs from other
languages such as Spanish, which has a straight one-to-one sound and letter correspondence.
Learners of English can find this very tricky as there may be no indication of how the letter symbol should be
pronounced. For example, the letter c can be:

 a hard sound, /k/, as in can, cake, cage

 a soft sound, /s/, as in cent, circle, city

The key points to remember when enhancing learners’ phonemic awareness:

1. Always remember that the end goal is the understanding of meaning, not phonemic awareness.
Phonemic awareness instruction is a critical objective which needs to be met on the way to the goal of
reading comprehension. It is certainly not an end goal in itself.
2. In some schools, a full phonemic awareness approach early in the programme may be the norm. If this
is what the school leaders have set down, there’s not much you can do about this, at least until you
have been there some time.
Or this type of approach may be followed because that’s the way it has always been done. The
problem with a full phonemic awareness approach is that it’s unlikely to work well in the initial stages
of learning, where your learners have limited meaning of words in English and lack oral proficiency.
Unlike native-English learners, they don’t know lots of chunks and phrases which native-English
speakers have already picked up from songs, stories, rhymes and chat from their parents/caregivers
and siblings. It will be wise to remember this.
3. Some teachers, for various reasons, often overemphasise the role of phonemic awareness. Perhaps it’s
because they and the learners enjoy this type of activity. Or maybe it’s a comfort zone for the teacher,
and he stays in that zone just a bit too much. The problem is that where there is more emphasis on
phonemic awareness than on meaning and comprehension, the learners may lose sight that they are
reading words. The decoding is critical, but it must not replace meaning and comprehension
(understanding). Phonics teaching should enhance comprehension; it should not usurp or be
deemed more important the primary goal of comprehension/understanding.
4. Never ask learners to decode a word where they don’t know its meaning. You need to focus on the
words they already know.
5. Phonemic awareness instruction should be tackled briskly and relevantly. It should always take place
in activities which are relevant and have a purpose. Learners should not be involved in phonics
instruction which has the effect of isolating letters and sounds from meaningful use in text.
6. It should emphasise chunks and patterns in words that learners will recognise when reading other
words with similar chunks and patterns.
4.1.3. Phonological And Phonemic
Awareness Activities
Here is a mix of phonological and phonemic awareness activities. We’ve put them together as you’ll likely be
doing quite a bit of interlinking of activities. A variety of activities and lots of practice are the keys to success.
Explore and reflect on what’s best to meet the need. And, remember, make it fun. Here are some activities:

1. Listen and imitate: This is a technique in which learners listen to a model (you or a recording) and
repeat or imitate it, e.g. breaking up a word into its syllable parts and noticing the change in mouth
and lip movements.
2. Minimal pairs: Seeing if learners can distinguish between minimal pairs. A minimal pair is simply a
pair of words that differ in only one phoneme (each meaningful sound in a language). Examples of
common minimal pairs are:
 ship/sheep
 pin/pen
 buy/boy
 hut/hat
3. Contextualised minimal pairs: In this technique, you establish the context/setting, such as a
blacksmith shoeing a horse, and present key lexis. Learners are then trained to respond to a sentence
stem with the appropriate, meaningful response (a or b) – Sentence stem: The blacksmith (a. hits / b.
heats) the horseshoe. Cued learner response: a. with the hammer / b. in the fire.
4. Visual aids: For sound formation, it may help to use a sketch of the mouth or a colour wall chart, and
to describe the pronunciation of a sound in terms of lips, tongue, teeth, etc.
5. Tongue twisters: This is a technique from speech correction strategies for native speakers. One well-
known example is: She sells seashells by the seashore. You could make up your own twisters.
Rhymes and jingles are also effective, as are chants.
6. Drilling: These can include imitation drills, with repetition of sounds, words and sentences and varied
repetition of drills (varied speed, volume, and mood)
7. Linking: Trying to link the sound to a word that they already know. For example, they may find the
sound in cheese quite easy, but then find it quite tricky when it appears in the middle of a word
like purchase. Reminding them of the sound in the word cheese will help them to form it correctly
in purchase.
8. Same or different: Read a short list of three words to the learners and ask them to tell you if you are
reading the same word, or if there is a different word in the list. If the words are all the same, they
say same, and if there is a different sound, they say different. The learners will not see the list of
words, of course, e.g. sit sat seat; ship sheep ship
9. Stop me: Very similar to the example above, except that the learners stop you when you use a
different sound, e.g. ship, ship, ship, ship, ship, sheep
10. Listen!: Place minimal pairs in sentences so that the learners listen carefully and decide on the word
being used.
Notice that both words must make sense in the context, e.g. Come here and have a look at this
lock/rock; If you sit up straight you won’t slip/sleep; He came to ask me about his cut/cat.
11. Pictures: Pictures can be very effective with learners of all ages. The learners can have pairs of
pictures in front of them; e.g. ship and sheep. When you say a word (or read out a sentence), they must
point to the appropriate picture.