It’s time to dive into the Difference between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics.
In this blog and video series, I am comparing pairs of literacy terms to help you as you teach your learners. For example, phonemic awareness and phonics. What exactly are they? What’s the difference between them and do they even intersect?
The following text in this blog post is part of what you’ll find in my video.
Watch the full video on my YouTube channel.
What’s the Difference Between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics?
Phonemic awareness: If you remember from our first video in this series, phonemes are the individual sounds in words.
So, phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds in words.
When learners have phonemic awareness, they can do things like:
count the individual sounds in words
segment (or break apart) the individual sounds in words
isolate the sounds in words when they tell you /m/ is the last sound in ham
blend the sounds to make a word
Now, the definition I was taught years ago about phonemic awareness is that we’re practicing sounds in WITHOUT using the actual letters…in other words, you can do phonemic awareness activities with your eyes shut.
For example, “How many sounds or phonemes are in the word mat?” {/m/ – /a/ – /t/}. Another example, “Blend these sounds together to make a real word: /ch/-/i/-/p/.” {chip.} In both of these examples, you do not need the physical letters, or graphemes, to accomplish the activities.
Phonics: The ability to connect the letters (the graphemes) and letter sounds (the phonemes).
When learners see the letter f, a child with an understanding of phonics would know that it makes the sound /ffff/. Reversely, a child with an understanding of phonics would know that when they hear the sound /d/, the letter d can represent that sound.
To recap, traditionally, phonemic awareness and phonics have been explained in this manner: Phonemic awareness is letter sound practice WITHOUT letters and phonics is letter sounds WITH the actual letters. Two different things, right?
Bridging Between Phonemic Awareness and Phonics
Instead, I think we should be thinking about the two terms more like this:
…with a shared space in between. Instead of pitting these two terms against each other (letters or no letters), we can blend the two. We can work on phonemic awareness AND AT THE SAME TIME integrate the actual letters as well.
We can integrate letters right into our phonemic awareness lessons.
Pull out some magnetic letters or letter tiles for an activity as you say, “Let’s find the letter that represents the FIRST SOUND in the word sock. Out of all these letters you see here, what letter should we use to spell the first sound of sock? An s. That’s right!”
If you’d like some more ideas on how to integrate the letters into your phonemic awareness lessons, I’d encourage you to visit my blog post, What is the Alphabetic Principle?
Another fun way to help learners count the sounds in words and also apply their phonics knowledge to spell and read the words are my Seasonal Mapping Mats.
Enjoy teaching!
~Becky
More Posts in this Series so Far…
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