Phonemic Awareness In Learning To Read

In this 21st century society, it is absolutely essential that every child is fully equipped with the ability to speak, read and write using the international language— English. Anyone unable to do these skills would enormously face a limitation in this information- flooded world.

In order to speak, read and write using the English language, one has to acquire phonemic awareness. According to Dewitz and Pearson (1997), phonemic awareness is the understanding that language is composed of small units of sound called phonemes. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear the separate sounds that comprise spoken words. It involves perceiving the relationships between sounds and having the ability to alter and rearrange sounds to create new words.

Without the knowledge of a word’s separate sound, it would be problematic for a person to recognize each letter sound and put them together to pronounce as a whole. Becoming aware of the sounds in a spoken language can easily equip a person the ability to identify, manipulate and substitute individual sounds of words. …show more content…
In accomplishing this remarkable feat, the child’s language learning system responds to information at the phonemic level without the need for conscious awareness of that level. Learning to read that language, if it is represented alphabetically, does require explicit knowledge of the phoneme since, unlike learning language, learning to read is a process that requires