Phonemes are the small units of speech that are created with the letters of an alphabetic writing system. Phonemic awareness is the awareness that language has small sounds.

Research shows that the absence of instructional support has deprived about 25% of middle-class first-graders and those from poorer backgrounds. Such children show serious difficulty with learning to express themselves in oral and written forms. 

This article will show you some proven activities that will help trigger phonemic awareness in elementary and preschool settings. 

What Does Research Have To Say About Phonemic Awareness?

The level of phonemic awareness exhibited by a child when entering a school is one of the core success determinants of learning to read. Results of the research show that phonemic awareness can be groomed via instructions.

What To Note About the Structure Of Language

If one is to build phonemic awareness in children, classroom teachers should know a bit about the language structure, emphasizing phonology. Phonology represents the study of the unconscious rules that govern the production of speech-sound. 

Phonetics stands for the study of how speech sounds are arranged. Phonics is a system in which the symbols represent sounds using a system of alphabetical writing.

The difference between the two phoneme sounds is often not noticeable, but the differences in sound can affect their meanings. 

Phonemes also stand for units of speech that are represented using the letters of the alphabetic language. This is the reason developing readers need to learn how to separate the sounds. They should also know how to group them to develop an understanding of the way the words are spelled. Such knowledge is under the canopy of phonemic awareness. One thing about phonemic awareness is that it is difficult to establish. 

One core difficulty with gaining phonemic awareness is that the sound for a particular phoneme differs from speaker to speaker and from word to word. In spoken form, these differences do not mean that there will be a difference in meaning. 

In America, for instance, the pronunciations of the vowels differ across dialects, regions, and individuals. This makes phonemic awareness critical.

Concluding Thoughts

Children should have an idea of the architecture of their language. The children are trained to synthesize words from phonemes and analyze the phonemes using words. They also practice saying and hearing those phonemes repeatedly, both in context and isolation. 

Once a child has perfected phonemic awareness, it is easier for knowledge of the alphabetic principles to develop.