The Power of Phonemic Awareness
When a child points to an object and calls it a bat, then points to another object and calls it a cat, that child demonstrates that his listening and speaking skills enable him to pick out the sound differences in those two words. The /b/ and /c/ phonemes mark the spoken differences between bat and cat.
Although native speakers pick up those distinctive phonemes without thinking about them, the printed page poses a new challenge. Now those phonemes are represented by symbols, letters of the alphabet. To read fluently, the reader has to develop automatic reactions to letters of the alphabet so he can recognize and blend their sound values without consciously doing so. That means learning the sound values of the letters, lots of practice to achieve automatic responses, and extensive reading to make printed language flow as easily as spoken language.
The forty-four phonemes of English are listed in the Table of Phonemes.
Read The Executive Summary, Phonemic Awareness, from the National Panel on Reading and share two or three ideas from the Summary that convince you most about the value of phonemic awareness. You may wish to print it to read it more comfortably. (Download the Executive Summary for printing [PDF].) Adobe's free Acrobat Reader is needed and may be obtained through the following link:
Write your three responses here:
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