Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate individual
sound units in spoken language: to examine language independent of meaning,
to see relationships between sounds in words, and to rearrange sounds to
create new words. Students who are phonemically aware are able to master the
following tasks:
Rhyming – The ability to identify and from rhyming words. Does it rhyme?
Yes or No
o big –wig, (yes)
o hot – pot, (yes)
o bee – dog, (no)
Sound Matching – The ability to hear and identify similar word patterns.
Which word does not belong?
o sun, sand, sad, pig (pig)
o bee, meat, sea, free (meat)
Syllable Counting - The ability to identify the number of syllables in a
spoken word. How many syllables do you hear?
o Ticket 2
o Dog 1
o Bicycle 3
Syllable Splitting - The ability to identify onset and rimes. What do you
get when you join these sounds together?
o J – ump (jump)
o Str – eet (street)
Phoneme Blending – The ability to orally blend individual sounds to form a
word. What would do you have when you join these sounds together?
o /m/ /a/ /p/ (map)
o /b/ /r/ /o/ /k/ (broke)
Phoneme Isolation – The ability to identify the beginning, middle and ending
sounds in a word. What sound is in the beginning, middle and end if the word
is big?
o Beginning /b/
o Middle /i/
o End /g/
Phoneme Counting - The ability to count the number of phonemes in a word. How
many sounds do you hear in these words?
o At 2
o Lake 3
o Tent 4
Phoneme Segmentation – The ability to break a word into individual sounds.
Which sounds do you hear in these words?
o Mud /m/ /u/ /d/
o Play /p/ /l/ /a/
Phoneme Addition – The ability to add a beginning, middle, or ending sound to
a word.
o What word would you have if you added /b/ to the beginning of low?
(blow)
o What word would you have if you added /r/ to the middle of bed?
(bread)
o What word would you have if you added /s/ to the end of how?
(house)
Phoneme Deletion – the ability to omit the beginning, middle, or ending sound
from a word.
o What word would you have if you took out the /f/ in flake?
(lake)
o What word would you have if you took out the/l/ in play?
(pay)
o What word would you have if you took out the /t/ in meat?
(me)
Phoneme Substitution – The ability to substitute a new sound.
o What word would you have if you changed the /b/ in ball to a /t//
(tall)
o What word would you have it you changed the /o/ in hot to an /a/?
(hat)
o What word would you have if you changed the /p/in map to a /d/?
(mad)
