Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and understand that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References). These skills are
- Essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.
- Fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that “man” and “moon” begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word “run”, he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.
- A strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.