Phonemic Awareness versus Phonetics

Phonemic awareness has long been known to be a prerequisite to learning to read. Its the ability to think about and manipulate individual sounds within spoken words. The Human Learning and Behavior Branch of the National Institutes of Health has formally recognized lack of phonemic awareness as the primary cause of dyslexia.

Phonemic awareness is the oral sensory-cognitive function that allows the person the ability to apply associations and rules necessary to read and spell. Phonetics is primarily the instruction in sound- symbol associations and rules that are found in reading and spelling. Phonetics is usually taught working backwards from spelling patterns to the sound system. Phonemic awareness is the opposite of this and involves working with the smallest units of sound and going towards spelling patterns.

The smallest distinctive unit of sound is a phoneme. Changing phonemes in a word results in a new meaning. For example: in the word /c//a//t/ and /m//a//t/ the /c/ and /m/ sounds are distinct phonemes. There are 44 sounds in the English language that communicate such meaning. These 44 sounds are represented in writting by what we call "graphemes". We only have 26 graphemes in English.