Phonemic Awareness Skill Set (PASS)

Phonemic awareness skills are critical and foundational for reading success.


Phonemic awareness skills are:

  • the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).
  • 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.
  • essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system.
  • a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.
  • Reference, http://reading.uoregon.edu/big_ideas/pa/pa_what.php


Phonics is a learned skill that relates the sounds (phonemes) used in Language to the codes used to spell words.


Words are sounds blended together.


Although there are a few single sound words, most words are two or more sounds blended together.


The word “cat” is three sounds /c/ + /a/ + /t/ blended together.


There are three skills that generally are used to test and train phonemic awareness: 1) blend, 2) segment and 3) drop.


Blend
Blending sounds together create words. Students must learn to build words from sounds, or analyze a word to identify the individual sounds that make up that word.


Segment
Students must be able to identify and select the individual sounds from a word.
For example, if told to select the 2nd sound in the word “cat”, the answer would be /a/.
Tutorial


Drop
Students must be able to drop a sound from a word and tell what sounds remain.
For example, if told to drop the 1st sound from the word “cat”, you would drop the /c/ and know what remains is “at” or /a/ + /t/.
Tutorial