Language & Literacy Development
PECT PreK-4
Module-2
Phonological Awareness, Phonemic Awareness & Phonics
Language & Literacy Development:
Communication Development Normally Occurring Within a Child's First Five Years of Life:
Language and communication development depend strongly on the language a child develops within the first five years of life. During this time, three developmental periods are observed. At birth, the first period begins. This period is characterized by infant crying and gazing. Babies communicate their sensations and emotions through these behaviors, so they are not yet intentional. They indirectly indicate their needs through expressive; however they feel, and when these needs are met, these communicative behaviors are reinforced. These expressions and reinforcements are the foundations for the later development of intentional communication. This becomes possible in the second developmental period, between 6 and 18 months. At this time, infants become able to coordinate their attention visually with other people relative to things and events, enabling purposeful communication with adults. During the third developmental period, from 18 months on, children come to use language as their main way of communicating and learning. Preschoolers can carry on conversations, exercise self-control through language use, and conduct verbal negotiations.
Milestone of Normal Language Development By The 2 Years Old:
By the time most children reach the age of 2 years, they have acquired a vocabulary of about 150 to 300 words. They can name various familiar objects found in their environments. They are able to use at least two prepositions in their speech (e.g. in, on, and under). Two-year-olds typically combine the words they know into short sentences. These sentences tend to be mostly noun-verb or verb-noun combinations (e.g. Go out, come in"). By the age of 2 years, children use pronouns, such as I, me, and you. They typically can use at least two such pronouns correctly. A normally developing 2 - year- old will respond to some commands, directions, or questions, such as "Show me your eyes" or "Where are your ears?"
Salient General Aspects of Human Language Abilities from Before Birth to 5 Years of Age:
Language and communication abilities are integral parts of human life that are central to learning, successful school performance, successful social interactions, and successful living. Human language ability begins before birth: the developing fetus can hear not only internal maternal sounds but also the mother's voice, and others' sounds outside the womb. Humans have a natural sensitivity to human sounds and languages from before they are born until they are about 4 ¼ years old. These years are critical for developing language and communication. Babies and young children are predisposed to greater sensitivity to human sounds than other sounds, orienting them toward the language spoken around them. Children absorb their environmental language completely, including vocal tones, syntax, usage, and emphasis. This linguistic absorption occurs very rapidly. Children's first 2 1/2 years particularly involve amazing abilities to learn the language, including grammatical expression.
Personal Narratives:
Personal narratives are the way that young children relate their experiences to others by telling the stories of what happened. The narrative structure incorporates reporting components such as who was involved, where the events took place, and what happened. Understanding and using this structure is crucial to young children for their communication; however, many young children cannot follow or apply this sequence without scaffolding (temporary support as needed) from adults. Adults can ask young children guiding questions to facilitate and advance narratives. They can also provide learning tools that engage children's visual, tactile, and kinesthetic (body position and movement) senses. This reinforces narrative use increases the depth of scaffolding, and motivates children's participation. Children learn to play the main character, describe the setting, sequence plot actions, and use words and body language to express emotions. Topic-related action sequences or "social stories" are important for preschoolers to comprehend and express to promote daily transitions and self-regulation. Such conversational skills attainment achieves milestones in both linguistic and emotional-social development.
Q.1. What is a phoneme?
Ans: A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that carries meaning. Readers use phonemes to distinguish between words. For example, the difference between ''hat'' and ''cat'' is one sound, or phoneme—the phoneme at the beginning of the words. These phoneme facts will help explain the phoneme definition.
A phoneme is not a letter. English has 26 letters, but 44 phonemes.
Most words are made up of two or more phonemes. For example, the word ''is'' contains two distinct sounds or phonemes.
Phonemes can be spelled differently. The words bait, weight, and plate all have the same phoneme in the middle of the word, but that phoneme is spelled in three different ways (ai, eigh, and a).
Two important literacy skills are phoneme segmentation (separating the phonemes in a word) and phoneme blending (combining separate phonemes to make a pronounceable word). Phoneme segmentation helps with spelling, while phoneme blending helps with decoding.
Phonological awareness focuses on the awareness of speech sounds, which young children typically practice and develop before they learn to read. Phonemic awareness refers to awareness of the individual phonemes or speech sounds used in the child's native language, which the child hears in the language spoken by the adults and older children around them in their environment.
Phonological awareness instruction teaches children to recognize the speech sounds they hear, to identify and differentiate these sounds, to produce them accurately, and to manipulate them.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.
Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word’s meaning. For example, changing the first phoneme in the word hat from /h/ to /p/ changes the word from hat to pat, and so changes the meaning. (A letter between slash marks shows the phoneme, or sound, that the letter represents, and not the name of the letter. For example, the letter h represents the sound /h/.)
Children can show us that they have phonemic awareness in several ways, including:
• recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound (“Bell, bike, and boy all have /b/ at the beginning.“);
• isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word (“The beginning sound of dog is /d/.“ “The ending sound of sit is /t/.“);
• combining, or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word (“/m/, /a/, /p/— map.“);
• breaking, or segmenting a word into its separate sounds (“Up—/u/, /p/.“).
Children who have phonemic awareness skills are likely to have an easier time learning to read and spell than children who have few or none of these skills.
Although phonemic awareness is a widely used term in reading, it is often misunderstood. One misunderstanding is that phonemic awareness and phonics are the same things.
Phonemic awareness is not phonics. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words. Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes, the letters that represent those sounds in written language. If children are to benefit from phonics instruction, they need phonemic awareness.
The reason is obvious: children who cannot hear and work with the phonemes of spoken
words will have a difficult time learning how to relate these phonemes to the graphemes
when they see them in written words.
Another misunderstanding about phonemic awareness is that it means the same as phonological awareness. The two names are not interchangeable. Phonemic awareness is a subcategory of phonological awareness. The focus of phonemic awareness is narrow—identifying and manipulating the individual sounds in words. The focus of phonological awareness is much broader. It includes identifying and manipulating larger parts of spoken language, such as words, syllables, onsets, and rimes—as well as phonemes. It also encompasses awareness of other aspects of sound, such as rhyming, alliteration, and
intonation.
Children can show us that they have phonological awareness in several ways, including:
• identifying and making oral rhymes;
“The pig has a (wig)."
“Pat the (cat)."
“The sun is (fun)."
• identifying and working with syllables in spoken words;
“I can clap the parts in my name: An-drew.“
• identifying and working with onsets and rimes in spoken syllables or one-syllable words;
“The first part of sip is s-."
“The last part of win is -in."
• identifying and working with individual phonemes in spoken words.
“The first sound in sun is /s/."
Phoneme:
A phoneme is the smallest part of spoken language that makes a difference in
the meaning of words. English has about 41 phonemes. A few words, such as a
or oh, have only one phoneme. Most words, however, have more than one
phoneme: The word if has two phonemes (/i/ /f/); check has three phonemes
(/ch/ /e/ /k/), and stop has four phonemes (/s/ /t/ /o/ /p/). Sometimes one
phoneme is represented by more than one letter.
Grapheme:
A grapheme is the smallest part of written language that represents a
phoneme in the spelling of a word. A grapheme may be just one letter, such as b,
d, f, p, s; or several letters, such as ch, sh, th, -ck, ea, -igh.
Phonics:
Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between
phonemes (the sounds of spoken language) and graphemes (the letters and
spellings that represent those sounds in written language).
Phonemic awareness:
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the
individual sounds—phonemes—in spoken words.
Phonological awareness:
Phonological awareness is a broad term that includes phonemic awareness. In
addition to phonemes, phonological awareness activities can involve work with
rhymes, words, syllables, onsets, and rimes.
Syllable:
A syllable is a word part that contains a vowel or, in spoken language, a vowel
sound (e-vent; news-pa-per; ver-y).
Onset & rimes are parts of spoken language that are smaller than syllables but larger than phonemes. An onset is the initial consonant sound of a syllable (the onset of the bag is b-; of swim, sw). A rime is the part of a syllable that contains the vowel and all that follows it (the rime of bag is -ag; of swim, -im).
Using Literature:
There is no better way to teach your students to read than with the use of literature. We define literature as books and other written materials. Using literature shows students just how important books are and it also shows them that we can learn a lot while reading. Once we show our students how to learn from books, they will be ready to grow and learn on their own when they are grown. In this lesson, we will look at some reading activities that can be incorporated into the classroom setting.
Guided Reading:
Let's look over the classroom of Miss Jane. She has a first-grade classroom of 25 students and she has one teacher's assistant. Looking into the classroom, we see that Miss Jane has pulled aside a small group of students to do a guided reading activity and each student in the group has a copy of the same book. Her teacher's assistant is helping the rest of the students in doing an independent activity. Today it is a word search. Miss Jane's small groups for guided reading activities have no more than six kids who are all at the same or similar reading level. Miss Jane chooses books that are challenging for the group but not too hard. She begins by asking the students to guess what the book may be about or what is going to happen. Then she instructs them to read to themselves from the book silently or in a very soft whisper. She makes sure that the students are OK with the reading. If she sees a student struggling, she helps that student out. She lets them read for about 10-15 minutes. After the students are done reading, Miss Jane then discusses the book with the students to see how well they understand the reading. They discuss what happened and what evidence in the book shows them what happened. Every day she pulls aside a different set of students to do the guided reading with, while her assistant overseas the rest of the class. This way all of her students will get a chance reading in a small group.
Becoming the Character:
In addition to the guided reading activity, Miss Jane also has activities for the whole class. The one that she is going to do right now is the Become the Character Activity. In this activity, Miss Jane asks the students to pretend that they are a character in a book that they have just finished as a class. Each student gets a sheet of questions to fill out. The student is to answer the question as if they are the character from the book. The sheet has questions like, what's your name? Where do you live? What is your friend's name? She then asks the students to think about an important event that happened in the book and has the kids write down how they, as characters, felt, and how they responded to the event. After this, Miss Jane asks the students to return to being themselves. She then asks them what they would have done; would they have done the same or would they have done something different than the character?
Incorporating Art:
Look, Miss Jane is getting ready for another activity now. She is getting crayons, markers, and paint out. She is getting ready to do an art project related to the reading. Miss Jane says she often stacks these activities together because having several different activities about a similar topic helps her students to remember the topic. They are still discussing the same book. For this art project, Miss Jane has the students read a particular portion of the book. She then asks the students to draw what is happening or what is described. This activity helps with reading comprehension. By seeing how her students interpret the words into pictures, she can see how well the students have taken in the book's information.
Lesson Summary:
Let's review what we've learned. We define literature as books and other written material. Teachers can use literature in different ways to help teach students to read and understand what they are reading. One activity is the Guided Reading Activity. This activity includes a small group of students at the same or similar reading level. The teacher has the students read a book that is challenging but not overly difficult. Before the reading, the teacher asks the students to guess what will happen. After the reading, the teacher asks the students about what happened. Another activity that helps with reading comprehension is the Become the Character Activity. In this activity, the teacher has the student pretend that he or she is a character in the book. The student then answers some questions about the character. The third activity is an art activity. In this activity, the teacher has the students draw a scene in the book. The students read a particular portion of the book and then they draw what they have read. This helps the teacher see how well the students are understanding what they have read.
Social Studies Foundations:
Human Socialization & Major Socializing Agencies:
Socialization is the process by which individuals learn their society's norms, values, beliefs, and attitudes and what behaviors society expects of them relative to those parameters. This learning is imparted by agencies of socialization. The family, peer groups, and leaders of opinion are considered primary socializing agencies. The family is probably the most important because it has the most significant influence on individual development. Families influence the self-concept, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors of each individual member. As children grow, they encounter peer groups throughout life, which also establish norms and values to which individual group members conform.
Schools, workplaces, religions, and mass media are considered secondary socializing agencies. Schools dictate additional academic and behavioral norms, values, and behaviors expected of their members. Religions also regulate members' behavior through beliefs, values, goals, and norms that reflect moral principles within society. Mass media communicate societal conventions (fashion/style), which enables individuals to learn and adopt new behaviors and lifestyles.
Influence Of Institutions On The Development Of Individual Identity, Relationships, Beliefs, And Behaviors:
Family is the first and most important socializing agent. Infants learn behavioral patterns from their mothers. Their primary socialization is enabled through such early behaviors as nursing, smiling, and toddling. Babies soon interact with other family members. All the infant's physiological and psychological needs are met within the family. Babies learn their sleeping, eating, and toileting habits within the family environment. Babies' personalities also develop based on their early experiences, especially the amounts and types of parental love and affection they receive. School is also a critical socializing agent. Children extend family relationships to society when they go to school. Cognitive and social school experiences develop children's knowledge, skills, beliefs, interests, attitudes, and customs and help determine the roles children will play when they become adults. In addition to family relationships, receiving reinforcements at school and observing and imitating teachers influence personality development. Peer groups that are based on friendships, shared ideas, and common interests in music and sports teach children about conforming to rules and being rejected for not complying with these rules. Mass media like TV profoundly influence children, both negatively and positively.
Culture:
While no single definition of culture is universally embraced, one from the cultural anthropology perspective is "a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors and artifacts that members of society use to cope with their worlds and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning."
(Bates and Fratkin, 2002) Cultural groups are based on a wide range of factors, including geographic location, occupation, religion, sexual orientation, and income. Individuals may follow the beliefs and values of more than one culture concurrently. For instance, recent immigrants often espouse values and beliefs from both their original and adopted countries. Traditionally, social systems like education and healthcare have approached cultural diversity by focusing on race/ethnicity and common beliefs about various racial/ethnic group customs. These are frequently generalizations (e.g. Lumping Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican cultures together and describing them as "Latino" culture). This type of practice can lead to oversimplified stereotypes and therefore, to unrealistic behavioral expectations. Service professionals need more detailed knowledge of cultural complexities and subtleties to effectively engage and interact with families.
Factors Affecting Parents Who are Immigrant To America:
Parents educated in other countries may not know a great deal about the American educational system and may not be aware of the educational demands made on their children, even in early childhood. Educators need to work with these parents to find common ground by identifying shared goals for children. While culturally diverse parents may disagree with some educators' goals, they can collaborate with educators to promote those on which they do agree. Immigrant parents may also be unaware of additional services available in America for children with developmental and learning problems. Educators can help parents by providing this information. Another consideration is that some other cultures have more paternalistic educational systems. Parents from such cultures, rather than vocally advocating for their children who need services, tend to wait for teachers to voice concerns before communicating any problems they have observed. Thus, they could miss out on the chance to obtain helpful services, or as resistance to confronting problems.
Essential Geographical Concepts:
Ten concepts considered essential to the study of geography are as follows:
1. Location identifies "where" a place is and examines the positive and negative properties of any place on the surface of the Earth. Absolute location is based on latitude and longitude. Relative location is based upon the changing characteristics of a region and is influenced by surrounding areas. For example, urban areas have higher land than rural ones.
2. Distance identifies "how far" a place is, and is often described in terms of location. It is also related to the effort required to meet basic life needs. For example, the distance of raw materials from factories affects transportation costs and hence product prices. In another example, land costs less the farther it is from highways.
3. Achievability identifies how accessible a geographical area is based on the conditions on the Earth's surface. For example, villages on beaches are easier to reach. Villages surrounded by forests or swamps are harder to reach. As its economy, science, technology, and transportation develop, a region's level of dependency on other areas changes.
4. Patterns are found in geographical forms and in how geographical phenomena spread, which affects dependency on those phenomena. For example, in fold regions (areas where the folding of rocks forms mountains), the rivers typically form trellis patterns. Patterns are also seen in human activity that is based on geography. For example, in mountainous regions, settlements predominantly form spreading patterns.
5. Morphology is the shape of our planet's surface resulting from inner and outer forces. For example, along the northern coast of Java, sugarcane plantations predominate in the lowlands.
6. Agglomeration is defined as collecting into a mass and refers to a geographic concentration of people, activities, and settlements within areas that are most profitable and naturalists perceive more utility value in forests than academics would.
7. Utility value refers to the existence and relative usefulness of natural resources. For example, fishermen find more utility value in the ocean than farmers do, and naturalists perceive more utility value in forests than academics would.
8. Interaction is the reciprocal and interdependent relationship between two or more geographical areas, which can generate new geographical phenomena, configurations, and problems. For example, a rural village produces raw materials through activities like mining ores or growing and harvesting plant crops, while a city produces industrial goods. The village needs the city as a market for its raw materials and may also need the city's industrial products. The city needs the village for its raw materials to use in industrial production. This interdependence causes interaction.
9. Area differentiation informs the study of variations among regional geographical phenomena. For example, different plants are cultivated in highlands vs. lowlands due to their different attitudes and climates. Area differentiation also informs the study of regional variations in occupation.
10. Spatial interrelatedness shows the relationship between geographic and non-physical phenomena, like rural and urban areas. The example above of village-city interaction also applies here.
Module-2 / Q/A
1. A teacher is planning instruction to promote four-year-olds' development of skills related to Pennsylvania's PreK-4 learning standard about reading, analyzing, and interpreting text. With children at this developmental level, which of the following approaches to a read-aloud activity would be most appropriate for the teacher to use to develop the children's conceptual understanding of fact and opinion?
Ans: Helping the children tell one thing they learned from a nonfiction text
Q.2. A fourth-grade teacher would like to promote reductant readers' independent reading. Which of the following teacher strategies is likely to be most effective in achieving this goal?
Ans: engaging students in discussions about their interests and working with the library media specialist to locate appropriate level books on these topics.
Q.3. A third-grade teacher regularly models for students how to paraphrase a portion of a text and how to pose and respond to questions that clarify or follow up on the information presented in a text. These practices promote students' literacy development primarily by:
Ans: Promoting their development of self-monitoring skills that support reading and learning across the curriculum.
Q.4. A first-grade teacher explains that he is going to read a story aloud and he wants students to consider how the story makes them feel. Afterward, he prompts the students to recall and discuss specific words and phrases the author used to evoke particular feelings. This oral language activity supports students' literacy development primarily by helping the students:
Ans: develop an awareness of a story's tone.
Q.5. A kindergarten teacher has placed many signs around the classroom, including simple written directions (e.g. Please hang up coats!) and labels for objects (e.g. clock, Teacher's chair). During daily activities, the teacher regularly points to and reads aloud relevant signs. The teacher has also created a classroom library filled with age-appropriate books and has incorporated relevant signs and books into all the learning centers. These strategies are most effective in addressing which of the following goals related to effective instruction in emergent literacy?
Ans: creating a print-rich environment
Q.6. At the beginning of the school year, a kindergarten teacher establishes a variety of classroom roles that rotate on a daily basis. The roles include calendar helper and star of the Day. The Calendar Helper identifies and announces the day of the week, the date, and the day's weather, with teacher support if needed. The star of the Day shares an object, talking briefly about the item and then answering three questions about it from the classroom and the teacher. Regularly performing these types of classroom roles directly benefits students' emergent literacy development primarily by enhancing the students':
Ans: the ability to use a range of expressive language skills
Q.7. In keeping with Pennsylvania's PreK-4 learning standards in language arts, which of the following writing skills would be most appropriate to include in language arts instruction at the first-grade level?
Ans: revising writing by adding details or missing information
Q.8. A teacher delivering standards-based literacy instruction grounded in scientific-based reading research is most likely to use the results of reading assessments for which of the following purposes?
Ans: Using ongoing informal assessments to continually plan and modify individual students' reading goals & instruction.
Q.9. A group of primary-grade teachers is reviewing potential core instructional materials for teaching beginning-reading skills. The most important selection criteria for the teachers to consider would be to ensure that the materials:
Ans: are aligned with relevant state learning standards
You can Buy Ebook 👉
The Research Building Blocks for
Teaching Children to Read
Put Reading First
Contents
i Introduction
1 Phonemic Awareness Instruction
11 Phonics Instruction
19 Fluency Instruction
29 Vocabulary Instruction
41 Text Comprehension Instruction
Introduction
In today’s schools, too many children struggle with learning to read. As many teachers and parents will attest, reading failure has exacted a tremendous long-term consequence for children’s developing self-confidence and motivation to learn, as well as for their later school performance.
While there are no easy answers or quick solutions for optimizing reading achievement, an extensive knowledge base now exists to show us the skills children must learn in order to read well. These skills provide the basis for sound curriculum decisions and instructional approaches that can help prevent the predictable consequences of early reading failure.
The National Reading Panel (NRP) issued a report in 2000 that responded to a
Congressional mandate to help parents, teachers, and policymakers identify key skills and methods central to reading achievement. The Panel was charged with reviewing research in reading instruction (focusing on the critical years of kindergarten through third grade) and identifying methods that consistently relate to reading success.
The Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies. Through a carefully developed screening procedure, Panel members examined research that met several important criteria:
• the research had to address the achievement of one or more skills in reading. Studies of effective teaching were not included unless reading achievement was measured;
• the research had to be generalizable to the larger population of students. Thus, case studies with small numbers of children were excluded from the analysis;
• the research needed to examine the effectiveness of an approach. This type of research requires the comparison of different treatments, such as comparing the achievement of students using guided repeated reading to another group of students not using that strategy. This experimental research approach was necessary to understand whether changes in achievement could be attributed to the treatment;
• the research needed to be regarded as high quality. An article or book had to have been reviewed by other scholars from the relevant field and judged to be sound and worthy of publication. Therefore, discussions of studies reported in meetings or conferences without a stringent peer review process were excluded from the analysis.
These criteria are not new in the world of educational research; they are often used as a matter of course by researchers who set out to determine the effectiveness of any educational program or approach. The National Reading Panel embraced the criteria in its review to bring balance to a field in which decisions have often been made based more on ideology than evidence. These criteria offer administrators, teachers, and parents a standard for evaluating
critical decisions about how children will be taught to read. In addition to identifying effective practices, the work of the National Reading Panel challenges educators to consider the evidence of effectiveness whenever they make decisions about the content and structure of reading instruction programs. By operating on a “what works” basis, scientific evidence can help build a foundation for instructional practice. Teachers can learn about and emphasize
methods and approaches that have worked well and caused reading improvement for large numbers of children. Teachers can build their students’ skills efficiently and effectively, with greater results than before. Most importantly, with targeted “what works“ instruction, the incidence of reading success should increase dramatically.
This guide, designed by teachers for teachers, summarizes what researchers have discovered about how to successfully teach children to read. It describes the findings of the National Reading Panel Report and provides analysis and discussion in five areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. Each section defines the skill, reviews the evidence from research, suggests implications for classroom instruction, describes proven strategies for teaching reading skills, and addresses frequently raised questions.
Our understanding of “what works“ in reading is dynamic and fluid, subject to ongoing review and assessment through quality research. This guide begins the process of compiling the findings from scientifically based research in reading instruction, a body of knowledge that will continue to grow over time. We encourage all teachers to explore the research, open their minds to changes in their instructional practice, and take up the challenge of helping all
children become successful readers.
v
Phonemic Awareness Instruction
Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds in spoken words. Before children learn to read print, they need to become aware of how the sounds in words work. They must understand that words are made up of speech sounds, or phonemes.
Phonemes are the smallest parts of sound in a spoken word that make a difference in the word’s meaning. For example, changing the first phoneme in the word hat from /h/ to /p/
changes the word from hat to pat, and so changes the meaning.
(A letter between slash
marks shows the phoneme, or sound, that the letter represents, and not the name of the
letter. For example, the letter h represents the sound /h/.)
Children can show us that they have phonemic awareness in several ways, including:
• recognizing which words in a set of words begin with the same sound (“Bell, bike, and
boy all have /b/ at the beginning.“);
• isolating and saying the first or last sound in a word (“The beginning sound of dog is
/d/.“ “The ending sound of sit is /t/.“);
• combining, or blending the separate sounds in a word to say the word (“/m/, /a/, /p/—
map.“);
• breaking, or segmenting a word into its separate sounds (“Up—/u/, /p/.“).
Children who have phonemic awareness skills are likely to have an easier time learning to read and spell than children who have few or none of these skills.
Although phonemic awareness is a widely used term in reading, it is often misunderstood.
One misunderstanding is that phonemic awareness and phonics are the same thing. Phonemic awareness is not phonics. Phonemic awareness is the understanding that the sounds of spoken language work together to make words. Phonics is the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes and graphemes, the letters that represent those sounds in written language. If children are to benefit from phonics instruction, they need
phonemic awareness.