Building a strong foundation in phonemic awareness is crucial for improving the reading and writing abilities of struggling readers.

As someone who has helped many such children, I have found that phonemic awareness is hands-down the most essential skill that is often missing.

Phonemic Awareness is one of the most important terms to understand when exploring dyslexia and reading struggles:  By understanding and grasping the significance of this concept, we can better assist our dyslexic learners.

Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness often get mixed up. If you want to find out the difference, I have another blog post you may find helpful here. “The Importance of Phonological Awareness When Learning To Read.”

Scientific research has shown that a child’s level of phonemic awareness is the number one predictor of reading success.

(Hoover & Tunmer, 1993) 

What is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the awareness that the words we speak are made up of individual sounds (phonemes). 

Phonemic awareness skills involve the ability to identify, isolate and manipulate these individual sounds or phonemes within words. 

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in our language.  For example, the word ‘top’ is made up of 3 sounds.  

  /t/   /o/   /p/  

Why is Phonemic Awareness so hard for some children?

So why is it so hard for our dyslexic learners to learn this and why is it that we see a lack of phonemic awareness so often with dyslexia? 

In short, scientific imaging of dyslexic brains has shown that when trying to read, the right side of the brain of someone with dyslexia is ‘lighting up’ and the left side of the brain is underutilised.

Below I will explain why this causes difficulty.

How do our brains learn to read?

To understand the difficulty experienced by our dyslexic learners, we need to talk about how our brains actually learn to read.  It is quite remarkable. 

Our brains are wired for spoken language.  That is, our brains listen to words and attach meaning to words and then learn how to pronounce those words as we learn to speak.  

Our brains are not naturally wired for the skill of reading and writing. 

These are acquired skills. In fact, our brains take the areas first used for speech and re-purpose them and re-organise pathways in order to read and write. 

Our ability to become aware of the individual spoken phonemes (sounds) within words is how we begin to rewire our brains for this new process. 

This is where phonemic awareness begins to take shape.

Building a strong reading foundation!

Following on from phonemic awareness, we then learn, through explicit instruction, the process of attaching phonemes (sounds) to graphemes (symbols – letters).

This happens most effectively and efficiently when using different areas within the left hemisphere of the brain. 

This is where our brains hear and attach meanings to words and then learn the letter combinations that represent the sounds in those words. 

Our brains then incredibly combine all that information together to store in the back part of our brain (the occipito temporal region) in order to be retrieved automatically when we read. 

As adults, it feels as if we have learned all of these words as wholes and read them as whole words.

However, our brains are still processing all of that sound-to-symbol information and retrieving it from the special ‘letter-box’ at the back of our brain.

This is now done automatically and extremely quickly, so we don’t have to stop and think of each sound.

Check out the simplified illustration below to show the 3 main areas used for reading in the left hemisphere of the brain.

So what about our dyslexic students?

Rather than using the efficient, left-brain system for reading and storing words, those with dyslexia use the right side of their brain, where they bypass phonemic awareness and letter/sounds altogether.

Trying to re-train the brain to hear the sounds, split them up, and attach letter combinations can be very difficult and tiring for dyslexic readers. 

It is rather like driving a manual car instead of an automatic one.

How can we assess Phonemic Awareness?

As you can now see, the first place we need to assess our dyslexic readers is with this skill of phonemic awareness.  

It is possible to build strong phonemic awareness with explicit structured literacy instruction and lots of review. 

This becomes the building block on which we can start to retrain and rewire dyslexic readers to utilise more of the left side of their brains in order for them to become fluent readers.

In the image below you can see 6 different levels of phonemic awareness that we can practice in order to form strong connections in the brain. 

It has also been shown in scientific research (National Reading Panel 2000), that using letters (graphemes) with our phonemic awareness training can result in faster progress.  

Interventions for Phonemic Awareness

Once we have assessed exactly where our students are struggling it is important to go to work strengthening those skills.

Some examples of activities that strengthen phonemic awareness are:-

Playing ‘I Spy’ by sounding out the word. 

• For example, I spy a /m/-/o/-/p/, and the child has to tell you what the word was.

Multi-sensory learning

Use counters or playdough to break words into sounds.  Multi-sensory learning helps to engage and also gives children a placeholder for each sound in the word.

Count the sounds.  You can say a word and get your child to tell you ‘how many’ sounds they hear.  For example, ask, how many sounds are in the word ‘read’?  Using fingers or counters to count the sounds.  /r/   /ea/   /d/.  There are 3 sounds in the word ‘read’.

Show a picture and get them to segment the word into sounds. See image below.

Listening Activities

The odd one out.  Do you remember this from Sesame Street? (Showing my age here).  One of these things is not like the other… Use this as a listening activity.  Say 3-4 words and then ask which word started with a ‘different’ sound.  For example, shop ship sharp sun.  You can make it easy or tricky like the previous example.  You can also use beginning, ending or medial sounds.  

Here are some example lists you could use:

Beginning Sounds: top tap tug sun

• get hug hen hit

• chin rich chop chat

• bin fat bug box

Ending Sounds: glam ham pam glad

• hot got sit log

• shop ship chin chip 

• rat flag hog tag 

Medial Sounds: hand trim sand tram 

• fit pin lot tip 

• dog fig win wig

• rum dim zoom sun

Using Letter Tiles

Use alphabet tiles.  Remember that research has shown that using actual letters in our phonemic awareness activities creates a stronger outcome. 

So we can lay out some letter & sound tiles and give the child a word like ‘shop’. So ‘sh’ should be represented on one letter tile as one sound. You can check out an example of these types of phoneme cards below. These ones are available in my TPT store.

Get them to pull down the letters / phoneme cards for each sound remembering that some sounds can be made with more than one letter.  Then ask them to change the word ‘shop’ to ‘ship’ and see if they can identify which sound needs to change.

Word Ladders

This is another activity like using alphabet tiles, except this time you are getting the child to write down each sound.  This can give great insight into letter formation alongside phonemic awareness. 

You can check out my Phonemic Awareness resource which has all the lists of words you can use for these activities along with letter tiles and word ladders to print and use.

Websites for Phonemic Awareness

There are some great websites for phonemic awareness activities you can use also.  The Florida Center for Reading Research is one of those websites.  They have some great phonemic awareness activities you can print and use.  One of those is called ‘Phoneme Dominoes’.  Give it a try.

Also, the IMSE (Institute for Multi-Sensory Education) has some great links in their link tree for building phonemic awareness and knowledge around structured literacy.

You can also check out my link tree here for free content and resources and come and follow me on Instagram where I share a lot of tips and ideas to help our struggling and dyslexic students.

Connect with me on Instagram & Learn more about the Science of Reading

Here is one of my recent reels explaining the different stages of phonemic awareness. I hope this helps!

If you have a struggling reader who is not progressing and you are concerned that they may have a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, please download my free step-by-step guide below to help you answer some questions and hopefully get you on the way to finding the right help for your child.

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