Phonemic Awareness 101
When kids are struggling to read, phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and work with the individual sounds in spoken language—is often the missing piece. And until that piece is in place, reading will continue to be hard.
So, What Is Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify, think about, and manipulate the smallest units of sound in spoken language—called phonemes. For example:
Knowing that the word dog has three sounds: /d/ /ŏ/ /g/
Being able to change the /d/ in dog to /l/ to make log
Why Is Phonemic Awareness So Important?
Phonemic awareness is a critical foundation for reading and spelling. Without it, students struggle to sound out unfamiliar words or to make sense of how letters represent sounds. Research shows that strong phonemic awareness in early years is one of the best predictors of later reading success.
How Do We Learn Phonemic Awareness?
Phonemic awareness is the most advanced and essential stage, and it's closely tied to future reading success. Phonemic awareness isn’t something we're born with—it’s a learned skill that develops over time.
Phonemic awareness skills usually develop in a predictable order, moving from simpler to more complex tasks. These are oral skills—not tied to letters or written language—and they typically progress like this:
Word Awareness
Understanding that sentences are made up of individual words.
Example: Clapping once for each word in the sentence, “I like dogs.”
Syllable Awareness
Recognizing and counting the beats or chunks in words.
Example: Knowing that basketball has three syllables: bas-ket-ball.
Onset-Rime Awareness
Hearing the beginning sound (onset) and the ending chunk (rime) of a syllable.
Example: In cat, /k/ is the onset and -at is the rime.
Phoneme Awareness
This is the most advanced level and includes multiple sub-skills:
Phoneme isolation: Identifying individual sounds
Phoneme blending: Hearing separate sounds and combining them into a word
Phoneme segmentation: Breaking a word into its component sounds
Phoneme manipulation: Adding, deleting, or substituting sounds in words (e.g., change the /h/ in hat to /m/ → mat)
Some students pick up phonemic awareness over time but most need to be taught explicitly. Once students begin to internalize the building blocks of sound, they have a much firmer foundation for learning to read and spell with confidence.
Many struggling readers have a hard time hearing the individual sounds in words. To them, a word like cat might feel like one solid chunk of sound, rather than a sequence of three distinct parts. Programs like LiPS help break this down by teaching students to notice how their mouth moves when they say each sound. When a student feels their lips pop open for /p/, or notices their voice box vibrating for /b/, they start to understand that each sound is physically different—even if the difference is hard to hear. This physical awareness gives them a new way to understand and work with sounds, which is the foundation for learning to read and spell. This awareness can also help students self-correct errors in reading and spelling.
Phonemic awareness is not a “nice to have.” It’s essential. And for many students—especially those with dyslexia or persistent reading struggles—it’s the one skill that needs to be targeted before everything else starts to click.
