The ability to read, write and comprehend written language — as well as speak, listen and understand spoken language — are both essential to everyday communication and functioning in society. In the United States, early childhood literacy has suffered since the COVID-19 pandemic. Only 47% of kindergarten students were reading at grade level during the 2021-2022 school year. That was a drop from the previous year’s level of 55%. In 2023, only 43% of fourth graders in the U.S. scored at or above a proficient reading level.
Educators are focusing on improving literacy at all grade levels, beginning with accurate competency assessments and incorporating various teaching techniques like phonics and phonemic awareness to build these foundational skills. Understanding the issues related to reading instruction and assessment using research-proven strategies is part of the skills literacy professionals gain from the online Master of Science in Education (MSEd) with a Concentration in Reading and Literacy program from Southern Oregon University (SOU).
What Are Phonics and Phonemic Awareness?
Phonics and phonemic awareness are two distinct components of early literacy education. In short, phonemic awareness helps children break words into sounds, while phonics helps them connect sounds to specific letters or letter combinations.
Phonics refers to the relationship between sounds and the letters that represent them. Individual sounds are phonemes and specific letters, or letter combinations are graphemes. This means that phonics instruction is both auditory and visual. Learning the letter or letter combinations that make up the 44 sounds or phonemes in the English language is the basis of phonics.
Phonemic awareness is an auditory skill and does not involve written language. It teaches the ability to identify and manipulate individual phonemes. Children learn the sound of language before they learn to read, and this complementary skill works together with phonics to support reading development, word recognition and spelling proficiency.
Phonemic Skills and Activities
Literacy learning is not one-size-fits-all, and educators can use various approaches and techniques to help students practice phonemic awareness. For example, as children learn the sounds of words, they can use rhyming to identify similar sounding words like cat, hat and bat. Changing the initial sound of a word to make other words helps them blend sounds for reading and segment sounds for spelling.
Some phonemic segmentation activities help teach kindergarten and first-grade students to break words into their phonemes. For example, having students say the whole word while making a sweeping motion with their hands together and then having them clap their hands as they sound out each syllable.
Additionally, hands-on and manipulative play strategies help early learners how to segment phonemes. Multisensory techniques that involve hearing, seeing and touching effectively help children connect with what they are learning. Educators can use counters, blocks or other small toys to represent individual phonemes that can be assembled to form whole words. Other effective hands-on aids include magnets that can slide on a magnetic board, beads on a string that can be separated and grouped together, or shape balls of different colored Play-Doh to represent the individual phonemes in a word.
With the necessary building blocks for words, students can practice building sentences. Beginning with two-phoneme words and building up to three-phoneme words helps to strengthen the skill of segmenting, leading to the ability to segment sentences into individual words.
Phonics Skills and Activities
Phonic awareness has a handful of methods and approaches as well. In phonics, “decoding” refers to a child’s ability to read new words by using their understanding of the connection between letters and sounds. Seeing a new word, the child can sound it out letter by letter. “Encoding” is the ability to match sounds to letters in order to encode or spell words. Once children connect letters to sounds, they can blend sounds to form words. Then, they can break words into individual sounds (segmenting), which helps strengthen reading, spelling and reading comprehension skills.
Some multisensory techniques can help children connect letters and their sounds. Educators can have learners spread shaving cream or sand on a cookie sheet or tabletop and then write a letter or word with their fingers. Air writing is another technique where kids hold an arm out and use two fingers to form letters in the air. Another tactile activity is to trace letters with their fingers on sandpaper or some other textured surface.
Scaffolding is an instructional method that support different learning activities until the child can complete a task without help. In reading, visual aids like flashcards, posters or letter magnets allow teachers to help students recognize sounds, letters and words until they can read them on their own.
Develop a Solid Foundation in Literacy Theory
The online MSEd with a Concentration in Reading and Literacy program from SOU helps future education professionals acquire a deeper understanding of literacy theory and research as well as emerging technologies that support reading and writing development. Courses like Foundations of Literacy; Language and Literacy in the Content Areas; and English Language Development: Curriculum and Pedagogy prepare students with phonics knowledge and phonemic awareness to improve learners’ reading and literacy skills.
Learn more about SOU’s online MSEd with a Concentration in Reading and Literacy program.
