B2. Phonemic Awareness
Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify and manipulate the smallest unit of sound in spoken words, phonemes. Phonemic awareness is essential for decoding and encoding words and is a focus in the Kindergarten and Grade 1 curriculum.
NOTE: If students were provided with effective phonemic awareness instruction in Kindergarten and Grade 1, most would have already mastered blending and segmenting, the essential skills necessary for success with decoding and spelling. In Grade 2, students leverage their phonemic awareness skills to support their reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding) skills.
During Grade 1, the focus was on:
- Identifying phonemes in different positions in a word (i.e., first, final, and then medial)
- Noticing and describing what the mouth (lips, teeth, and tongue) are doing when producing different sounds
- Blending phonemes in words up to 5 phonemes
- Segmenting words containing up to 5 phonemes
- Splitting multisyllabic words into its syllables and then segmenting each phoneme in each syllable
New for Grade 2:
By Grade 2, the phonemic awareness skills of isolating, blending and segmenting should be consolidated. As a result, there are no specific phonemic awareness expectations for grade two.
It is not necessary to assess phonemic awareness for all students this year. However, for students whose screening data indicates a risk for reading difficulties, use ONlit’s “Making Sense of Screening” infographic to determine which students need a diagnostic assessment for phonemic awareness.
Note: This is not an exhaustive list of all expectations in this strand. For a more detailed view, please see the official Ontario curriculum.
Phonemic Awareness Intervention
For students whose assessment data indicates a need for phonemic awareness intervention, there are a few important things to know (Phoneme Awareness Research Updated by Dr. Susan Brady – 2022):
- Phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when integrated with letter knowledge, handwriting, and reading
- Phonemic awareness develops in a predictable manner. Children generally develop phonemic awareness in terms of the position of the phoneme in a word/syllables (Brady, 2022).
- Although there is a continuum of skills that students typically progress through from larger segments (i.e., rhymes, syllables) to the smallest segment (phonemes), students do not need to show mastery of the larger segments before learning about phoneme awareness.
- Instruction should aim to focus on the phoneme level as quickly as possible, as phoneme awareness skills are the ones most critical for learning how to read and spell. Avoid wasting time on larger units (rhymes, syllables, etc.).
- By Grade 2, students who are still struggling to read simple one-syllable words should have phoneme awareness built into their phonics instruction.
- While some commercial resources include activities where students substitute and delete sounds through “advanced phonemic awareness”, research does not indicate this is necessary.
Further Reading
- Teaching Phonemic Awareness and Word Reading Skills (Stephanie Al Otaiba et al., IDA Perspectives)
- A 2020 Perspective on Research Findings on Alphabetics: Implications for Instruction (Dr. Susan Brady), includes video of updates from 2022
- Phoneme Awareness: What We Now Know (Dr. Susan Brady)
Suggested Resources
- Phonemic Awareness: An Overview
- Phoneme Awareness Word List
- Elkonin Boxes
- UFLI Virtual Teaching Hub – Phonemic Awareness Activities
- Search ‘Phonemic Awareness’ in the Resource Library for more!
