Subscribe to our Blog

To access a fun activity, word list, & phonological awareness survey, don't miss our Teacher Tips, Fun Facts, Check It Out!, and Word of the Week at the end of the blog!

What Is Phonemic Awareness?

Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words (Kilpatrick, 2015). Phonemic awareness is a subset of the broader category of phonological awareness, which is one’s conscious awareness of and ability to “play with” the sound structures in oral language (Paulson & Moats, 2010). 

Download our Phonological Awareness Assessment>>

Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Improve Students’ Reading Using Their Ears

Why Are the Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness Essential to Learning to Read?

Adams (1994) emphasizes that while phonemic awareness is essential for learning to read, it is not easily established, and children need explicit instruction to gain the necessary skills. This makes it extremely important for teachers to understand that there are various layers of phonemic awareness and that each of these layers represents a skill that can be developed through targeted instruction and practice. These layers build from the simplest phonemic awareness skills at the bottom of the pyramid to the most complex at the top. These are skills that can be modeled, practiced, and established through oral wordplay.

The Six Layers of Phonemic Awareness: Definitions & Examples of Instruction at Each Layer

Phoneme Isolation: Hearing and isolating the individual phonemes (sounds) in spoken words represents the first layer of skilled phonemic awareness. Isolating phonemes entails knowing that a word is made up of a sequence of sounds and that the individual sounds in words can be differentiated from one another. Beginning sound isolation activities are a great way to help students develop their phoneme isolation skills. Beginning sound isolation is simply pulling the first sound off of a spoken word. Students can isolate the first sounds in words, as in /b/, bear, or /s/, soap.

Blending: Moving up the pyramid, we come to a slightly more complex phonemic awareness skill, phoneme blending. Phoneme blending, which is basically combining sounds, involves listening to and pulling together isolated phonemes to create words. This process requires a student to hold the individual elements in his/her mind as the word is created, thus challenging a student’s active working memory. When beginning readers sound out a word, they use letter-sound knowledge to say each sound in a word (/b/ /ă/ /t/), and then blend the sounds quickly together to read the word (bat).

Segmenting: The third layer in the pyramid is phoneme segmentation. This is the ability to divide a spoken word into its component sounds (phonemes). In a segmentation activity, students are given a word like mad, and then they segment it, or “stretch” the phonemes, /m/ /ă/ /d/. As they are saying the sounds, they can extend a single finger for every phoneme that they hear, starting with the thumb: /m/ (extend thumb), /ă/ (extend index finger), /d/ (extend middle finger). Lastly, they blend the phonemes together as they bring their hands back to their chests and say the word, mad.

Phoneme Addition: Phoneme addition involves adding phonemes to a given word to produce a new word. For instance, starting with the word we and adding the phoneme /k/ to the end turns it into week. Phoneme addition can be done with more complex words as well; starting with the word bell and adding the phoneme /t/ at the end turns it into belt.

Phoneme Deletion: Conversely, starting with the word guide and deleting the final phoneme, /d/, creates the new word, guy. A more complex example of phoneme deletion might include removing one phoneme from a two-sound blend. Starting with the word blast and deleting the initial phoneme, /b/, results in the new word, last.

Phoneme Substitution: Phoneme substitution, the most advanced of all the manipulation skills on our pyramid, requires that a student knows how to both delete and add phonemes. In a phoneme substitution exercise, a student might be asked to drop the short i sound in kit and replace it with the long i sound. When they do, kit becomes kite. This is done through a few intricate steps that are performed automatically and without conscious thought for strong, fluent readers. These steps include recognizing the component parts of the known word (segmenting the word into its phonemes), isolating a specific phoneme, deleting that phoneme, adding the new phoneme, and blending the phonemes together to say the new word. Did you notice that these steps include every one of the lower five layers of the pyramid? That’s right —phoneme substitution, our top layer, encompasses every single layer of the phonemic awareness pyramid. If even one of these lower skills is weak, students will struggle to substitute phonemes.

The Importance of Phoneme Substitution

Teachers are often comfortable with and therefore put the instructional focus on the phonemic awareness skills toward the bottom of the pyramid, particularly phoneme blending and phoneme segmentation. Although these skills are undoubtedly important in helping students as they are learning to decode, it is actually the top of the pyramid, with the more complex phonemic skills, that is often left out of classroom instruction and, where we need to pay the most attention, particularly as students move beyond the primary classroom. Kilpatrick (2015) tells us that research suggests that “phonological manipulation tasks are the best measures of the phonological awareness, skills needed for reading because they are the best predictors of word-level reading proficiency” (page 155) because phoneme manipulation (adding, deleting, and substituting) is actually the layer of phonemic awareness that is the most closely related to reading connected text (Kilpatrick, 2015).

Phoneme substitution is the critical breakthrough skill a child needs to teach themselves how to read new words. As illustrated in the images above, if a student encounters a new unfamiliar word, like moth, they can use their knowledge of a word that they already know (like math) to teach themselves how to read this novel word. Remember that manipulation activities require students to hold phonemes in their working memory long enough to isolate specific phonemes, add, delete, or change specific phonemes, and then blend the phonemes back together to form a new word. Kilpatrick (2015) states that “training in phonemic manipulation has a substantial long-term impact on reading.”