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Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness, or Phonics?

Jonnathan Elizondo
8 abr 2017
2 Min. de lectura

One of the key elements in the new English curriculum (which, by the way, makes me really happy) is the incorporation of reading development since first grade. The idea is that students do not only learn to pronounce better but also to read more proficiently and effectively.

However, when we see the terms in the syllabus, a big question mark is drawn in many teachers' faces. Do I have to teach what? and what is the difference between phonological awareness, Phonemic awareness, and phonics?

This time I want to dig a little dipper on the three terms so that we know what we have to teach and do it in a more accurate way. To begin with let's talk about the word "Phoneme". A phoneme is considered the smallest unit of sound in a language. It is not always represented by one letter. Such is the case of combinations ch or sh that produce only one sound.

Phonological Awareness:

"Phonological awareness encompasses a child’s ability to recognize the many ways sounds function in words" (WP. Smith, 2016). It refers to the broader awareness of sounds. It can go to the simplest thing of identifying a sound to the skills of rhyming (fan, tan, man), alliteration (playing with words like when using tongue twisters), syllabication (dividing words into syllables), and phonemic awareness (work with phonemes). All of these have to do with being aware of the sounds that are present on a word to be able to carry out different tasks.

Phonemic Awareness:

It is a subdivision of phonological awareness. It "is only her [student's] understanding of the most minute sound units in words" (Idem). It refers to being aware of phonemes. In the new curriculum for first grade, this is actually what we are doing. Our students are learning initial sounds in words.

Phonics

Phonics "helps children learn the relationship between letters of the written language and the sounds of the spoken language. Phonics instruction focuses on the 1:1 correspondence between letters and sounds". (University of Virgina, 2003)

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By looking at these three concepts, we can now know what our focus in the class will be and therefore we can find activities that suit our needs.

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The following video summarizes the concepts and provides great examples of activities to practice isolating, segmenting, blending, and manipulating sounds in the Phonemic awareness raising of our classes.