Jennie Sjursen 0:01
Phonological Awareness Phonemic Awareness, Phonics. I thought they were all the same thing. What's the difference? And why is everyone telling me it's so important?
Jennie Sjursen 0:13
I'm Jenny Sjursen, ex-special-educator-turned-dyslexia interventionist. It wasn't so long ago that I too, was overwhelmed by balanced literacy versus structured literacy, education speak, and everything in between. Fast forward after many, many hours of self driven education. And you'll see I've built a thriving dyslexia practice helping students from ages six to eight t. My specialties, working with a quote unquote difficult almost always to the student, and breaking down the complexities of dyslexic to everyday language strategies and action steps.
Jennie Sjursen 0:53
Before we dive in, can you do me a huge favor? Would you mind sending this episode or just sharing my podcast with three of your friends, I've been working really hard to put out valuable content to support parents with dyslexic children. And I want to make sure it gets into the hands of the people that need it the most. So grab the link to this episode or podcast texted to three friends, where you can just click the share button and send it that way. Whatever works for you, but I will be forever grateful. Thank you.
Jennie Sjursen 1:23
If you suspect your child has dyslexia, or you're just starting this journey, in your quest for more information, you've probably come across the terms phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics. They seem like they might be the same thing. But in reality, they're not. They're more like nesting dolls, those dolls where one nests inside the other, and the whole progressively gets larger and taller. The first I'll talk about is phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is a term used to refer to a lot of different skills. One of those sets of skills is phonemic awareness. phonemic awareness is a smaller doll that fits inside of the phonological awareness doll. But we'll come back to that later.
Jennie Sjursen 2:13
So what skills does phonological awareness cover? They are all oral language skills, not print skills, and they are rhyme and alliteration words in a sentence, syllables, onset rhyme, and phonemic awareness. The skills most kids pick up first is the ability to recognize and manipulate rhyme and alliteration. The best example and King of rhyme and Alliteration is Dr. Seuss. From the book my mother swears I had to have read to me every night before bed, Green Eggs and Ham comes this example of rhyme. I do not like green eggs and ham I do not like them Sam I am. Alliteration is when you use the same beginning sound for a series of words or words that are close together. For example, the title of Dr. Seuss is the butter battle book. Each word in the title starts with a sound. Another example is the tongue twister Sally sells seashells where each word begins with us sound. In fact, many of the old nursery rhymes are filled with rhyme and alliteration. Whether they knew it or not the people teaching and repeating these old rhymes were promoting key language skills.
Jennie Sjursen 3:26
The next skill most kids acquire is awareness of words in a sentence. Basically, they become aware that sentences are strings of connective words that have meaning. Given a sentence, they can tell you how many individual words are in a sentence. For example, they can tell you go to bed has three words in it. And they can spend a lot of time delay and go into bed by counting and checking their count.
Jennie Sjursen 3:50
The third skill most kids obtain is the ability to recognize or manipulate syllables, syllables, or the beats or the rhythm of a word. Ask most kids how many syllables are in butterfly. I'll tell you three. Give them the syllables L. E. fant and ask them what word that makes when it's all put together. And they'll tell you elephant give them the word kangaroo and ask them what's left when you take away rue. And they'll tell you Kanga.
Jennie Sjursen 4:17
After syllables comes the ability to recognize and play with onset and rhyme. onset and rhyme is the step before phonemic awareness. When given a one syllable word kids are able to recognize and separate the initial or beginning sound, the onset from the string of letters at the end, rhyme. So for example, given the word cat they can break it into at when they're asked to take away the sound and use the sound.
Jennie Sjursen 4:49
They they're able to manipulate the sounds to tell you that the new word is hat.
Jennie Sjursen 4:55
The last phonological awareness skills kids tend to pick up is phonemic awareness. Our doll inside the phonological awareness doll. This is the most advanced stage. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound, an eye, etc. At this stage a child can recognize and play with the individual sounds within a given word.
Jennie Sjursen 5:20
When asked what word does the sound make, they can tell you pig, or when given the word map and told to change the tour. They can tell you the new word is Matt. So if they only deal with sounds, why is font illogical and phonemic awareness so important? Because they encompass the knowledge needed to start matching those sounds to letters and letter patterns. This is phonics, our largest nesting doll, which houses both phonological and phonemic awareness. Phonics is the act of matching oral language sounds to letters and letter patterns. So why is this also important? Because if you can't hear all the sounds in a word, you're not going to be able to accurately match the sounds to a letter or letter pattern. This makes decoding really difficult, which in turn makes encoding or spelling even harder.
Jennie Sjursen 6:21
And here's the thing that nobody explicitly tells you. All language is intricately interwoven, oral reading, writing, you can't pull them apart. Let's take this a step further. oral language comes first, our brains are hardwired for it. Our brains are not hardwired for reading and writing. So the first indicator that someone might have a problem with reading is usually going to show up in oral language or in speech skills. If you can't hear or produce all the sounds, it's going to make reading and writing that much harder. And you guessed it, a major indicator of dyslexia is a weakness and chronological or phonemic awareness.
Jennie Sjursen 7:03
If you have any further questions about phonological awareness, please feel free to sneak into my inbox. We'd also love your input. What would you like to hear from us in the future? Is there a topic we haven't covered yet? You really want to learn more about or do you have a pressing need and you're not really sure how to handle it or move forward? Send us a DM on Instagram or drop us an email at Jennie@literacy untangle.com That's J E n n i e at literacy untangle.com We can't wait to hear from you. Until next time, bye bye.
Jennie Sjursen 7:37
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Literacy Untangled. If you love this episode as much as I did, head on over and rate and subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you want to continue the conversation or share your takeaways, head on over to our Instagram at literacyuntangled and comment on your favorite part. I can't wait to hang out with you again soon. Bye bye.
