Definition

For purposes of learning to read, auditory processing is the ability to hear, distinguish and interpret the sounds of language. It is also commonly referred to as phonemic awareness.


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; seeReferences).
  • 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