Imagine a phonics or word study lesson:
A teacher writes the word flap up on the white board, and demonstrates how to sound and blend the word. Then, she jots down additional words with the -ap pattern, inviting students to decode them and she repeats this with another short-a pattern like -ag. Finally, the teacher erases the words and asks students to spell each word on their own board.
This is a lesson that we’ve taught, and it’s not bad, but it’s missing one key part. Do you see it?
It’s missing explicit phonemic awareness practice. Lots of research shows that phonemic awareness is essential to decoding and orthographic mapping--the process that helps readers store words in long term memory (Kilpatrick 2015, Brady, 2020).
Let’s take a moment to define phoneme awareness. Here’s Susan Brady’s definition:
Phoneme Awareness: Ability to be aware of and think about the individual speech sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. It is this type of awareness that is key for reading development. Phoneme awareness generally progresses from awareness of:
a) The external phonemes in spoken words (i.e., the initial phoneme, the final phoneme); to
b) Awareness of the medial vowel in words with simple syllables (consonant-vowel-consonant) such as in the three phoneme words meat, boot, cape, or bed (note the focus is on the speech sounds, not on the spelling); to
c) Awareness of the internal consonants in one syllable words with consonant blends (e.g., CCVC (snap); CVCC (pink); CCVCC (stamp): CCCVC (stripe)).
So, let’s revise this lesson.
The teacher sits next to a blank white board and says “Let’s practice blending sounds together in words. Listen to me do it first. I’ll say the sounds and then put them together to say the words. /f/ - /lllllll/ - /aaaaa/- /p/ —> flap!” The class does this work with several words, incorporating a gesture like finger tapping. She then moves on to decoding work, “Now that we’ve practiced blending sounds together, let’s sound and blend words using their letters.” Marie writes flap on the board and works to decode this word and the rest with the students. Finally, she erases the words, and invites students to do some spelling work. As part of this work, she demonstrates and prompts students to segment the sounds in each word before spelling them with letters. “Spell flap. Listen for each sound first. Let’s do it together! /f/ - /l/ - /a/- /p/ - How many sounds? 4!” She repeats this process for the remaining words.
The important thing is that we include explicit phonemic awareness practice in our phonics lessons.
If you’re interested in reading the latest research about phonemic awareness and it’s relationship to phonics, or unpacking some phonemic awareness lingo, we like Susan Brady’s full article, A 2020 Perspective on Research Findings on Alphabetics (Phoneme Awareness and Phonics): Implications for Instruction (Expanded Version),
We invite you to reflect — when does phonemic awareness instruction happen in your classroom? And how is that instruction connected to decoding and spelling?
Tip: Did you know that Daffodil Hill Press decodables in Spanish and English include a lesson plan for each book with opportunities for phonemic awareness practice and instruction in both blending and segmenting?
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