English Language: Deciphering The Alphabetic Language

Deciphering the Alphabetic Code “English language is an alphabetic language, and children learn to crack this code as they learn about phonemes (sounds), graphemes (letters), and graphophonemic (letter-sound) relationships” (Tompkins, 2014). Children learn the letters as they speak the alphabet and learn to spell their names. Children learn sounds as they use syllables to segment a word or hear words that rhyme. Children use graphophonemic relationships to understand how letters and sound are related. Graphophonemic relationships are used to teach phonemic awareness, while changing graphemes to phonemes is used to teach phonics (Tompkins, 2014). Phonemic awareness and phonics have many differences and few similarities. In the first place, “Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds- phonemes—in spoken language” (What, n.d). Phonemic awareness is the foundation for learning phonics and spelling. Students who are phonemically aware can identify the words that start with the same sound, can isolate and say the first and last sound of a word, can blend the separate sounds of a word to say the actual word, and can segment a word into its separate sounds (Tillack, 2013). The difficulties in learning …show more content…
Both of these are techniques are building blocks to a student learning to read and write. Also phonemic awareness and phonic us phonemes to create words, however phonemic awareness is completely auditory, while phonics use the written language or print. In contrast, phonics, use print to teach the different sounds made by letters or combinations of letters, while phonemic awareness is segmenting the words into syllable then blending the sounds into a word. Phonemic awareness is the foundation for phonics and spelling. Phonics is decoding the sounds that letters and letter combinations make to create words (Tompkins,