What are phonemic awareness skills?

Phonemic awareness skills are the skills needed to recognize that a spoken word consists of a sequence of individual sounds.

Here are some examples of phonemic awareness skills:

• Segmentation, including the ability to

  • judge if two words start the same or end the same
  • remove a phoneme from a word
  • count phonemes in a word, and
  • blend sounds together

• Sound/symbol identification, including

  • knowing the letters by sight and by sound, and
  • matching letters with the appropriate sounds and vice versa
• Awareness of sound patterns in the language

• Developing awareness of sounds

• Concept module: phonemic awareness skills
• In overview module: Glossary (Literacy): P
• In modular book: Glossary of literacy terms
• In document collection: Reference materials
• In bookshelf: Literacy

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 4.0, published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 1999. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 2 July 1998

© 1999 SIL International