As an organization composed of former educators, we understand how busy each school day can be. With a full plate of things to teach and address, your teachers are constantly asking themselves “How can I fit in one more thing?” So, it’s no wonder that many of them don’t have the time to research strategies to enhance their students’ phonemic awareness skills.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words. It’s a foundational skill that is critical for reading and spelling and is a core component of the Structured Literacy approach to instruction. To enable busy educators to better develop their students’ literacy skills, here are three effective and evidence-based phonemic awareness instructional practices they can implement in their classrooms:
While phonological awareness encompasses an understanding that language is comprised of varying sizes such as words in sentences, syllables in words, or parts of words that result in rhyming, the most important unit to emphasize is individual sounds or phonemes. Instruction on larger units does not yield more impactful results than focusing on individual phonemes. Specifically, teaching students to blend and segment phonemes are the most important skills that connect directly to reading and spelling words. So, educators can maximize instruction by focusing on phonemes first.
Evidence indicates that phonemic awareness instruction is more effective when letters are presented alongside sounds (Barshay, 2024; Eunice Kennedy Shriver NICH & DHHS, 2010; Erbeli et al., 2024; Rehfeld et al., 2022) and when handwriting is integrated with decoding and spelling instruction (James, 2017; James & Engelhardt, 2012). So, by integrating these different skills into a single lesson, teachers can reinforce each skill and use class time more efficiently. For example, a teacher could ask her students to segment the sounds in a word to reinforce an important phonemic awareness skill and then ask them to write down the letter or letters for each sound. By combining the alphabetic principle with encoding, students will master both skills more quickly.
For some students, especially multilingual learners (MLLs), articulating English phonemes may be more of a challenge. It’s important for early readers to be able to clearly and accurately articulate sounds so they can associate them with letters to blend for decoding or segment for spelling. By modeling sounds accurately without distorting or adding extra sounds, providing cues like sound cards, and telling students how to distinguish sounds, educators can help students acquire this skill to produce the correct sounds associated with letters that facilitate decoding.
For more tips on how to improve your students’ phonemic awareness skills, download the white paper Integrated Phonemic Awareness: The Efficient and Effective Way to Build Reading Foundations.