I have been getting many kindergarten teachers asking me about the difference between phonological awareness and phonics or between phonemic awareness and phonics. You’ve got to see how frustrated they look when asking “what the hell is the difference between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness?”. I know, I know. It’s confusing isn’t it? No worries. Stick around for a little while longer and I’ll help you figure it all out.
Let’s kick it off with phonological awareness, shall we?
Phonological awareness is a term we use to refer to the entire sound structure of the language. It is a general term to refer to the sound system of a certain language. If you have a phonological awareness, you are obviously aware of the phonological characteristics of the language. Now what are the phonological characteristics of a language?
Well, to keep it simple, they are its sound system. It has no connection with meanings mind you. What are we exactly talking about when we say “sound system”? Pretty much everything isn’t it? The Rhymes, rhythm, syllables, melody etc. How about a quick example? You’re just chewing the fat (having a casual conversation, gossiping) with your “amigo” (means “friend” in Spanish), and you blurt out the following sentence:
“round and round we go, don’t even utter a sound amigo!”
Now, your “amigo”, who happens to have plenty of phonological awareness (and he doesn’t even know it), jiggles (laughs a bit) and says:
Amigo: Hey did you just come up with that?
You: What are you talking about? Come up with what?
Amigo: You rhymed! You know “round we go, sound amigo”?
You: (confused at first) Oh yeah right, no I had no idea, I didn’t mean it!
That is an example of someone with phonological awareness, his “amigo” has a good ear for the sounds of the language, his ears can pick up sound patterns that others can’t.
So what about phonemic awareness?
Right. Phonemic awareness is part of phonological awareness, but unlike phonological awareness, it is far more precise and specific. It is specific because it does not deal with anything except individual phonemes.
Phonemes mean “isolated sounds” as in /t/ not letter T (which is pronounced as [tea]), or /h/ not letter H (which is pronounced as [eitch]) etc. Phonemic awareness is harder to achieve because you would have to be able to manipulate each sound in each word separately. So if you’re a pronunciation freak like me, you’ll start looking at a certain word and just dissect it all up into several tiny sounds and then put them all back together, you play around with each sound, you delete a sound, you replace another etc. How about an example? let’s look at the word “tape”.
How many sounds does the word “tape” have? 1-[t] (consonant /t/), 2-[a] (vowel /eɪ/), 3-[pe] (consonant /p/). A lunatic like me would be completely “aware” of each one of those sounds while any other “sane” person would just think of the meaning of “tape” as in “Sellotape” or “film”. I’m so insane that I would look at the following possibilities:
1-Delete the /t/, you have [ape].
2-Replace the /p/ with /k/, you have [take].
3-Replace the /eɪ/ with /aɪ/, you have [type].
4-Replace the /t/ with /k/, you have [cape].
5-keep the consonants and just change the vowel, what would happen? [tip] [top] [tap].
It has been proven that such skill, or having strong phonemic awareness is associated with advanced reading skills (fluency and comprehension). This is NOT a joke. Seriously, it IS.
What does this have to do with phonics then?
Patience. Patience my friends. Phonics is concerned with the relationship between letters and sounds. Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness have NOTHING to do with letters. So as soon as we bring the letter into the picture, we’re talking about phonics. Phonics is important because, as you probably know, in English, there are between 44 and 50 phonemes but ONLY 26 letters, so reading, writing and spelling can be the worst nightmare (not the only one) for English learners.
Phonics help a lot, but without phonological awareness and phonemic awareness, it is POINTLESS. It would be completely ineffective. That is where most kindergartens are going wrong. They teach phonics without teaching the sound structure of the language first.
Most teachers have no clue what phonemic awareness is or how to teach it. Without it, your students will probably speak fluent English during their early years but if they happen to be living in Japan, for example, where they hardly have any chance to speak with native speakers in the future, their English skills will start to deteriorate until they actually forget everything they learned.
The right thing to do is to give your ESL students systematic phonemic awareness training so that they will become fluent readers of English, and that is a gift that will keep on giving for many years to come. At least the parents will be happy that they haven’t poured money down the drain (wasted their money for nothing).
That’s it. Feel free to shoot me any questions you might have and I, being the great coach I am, will always be more than happy to help.
Do you guys teach phonemic awareness and phonics? Any great ideas you’re interested in sharing with the rest of us?
Leave a Reply