Pondering About Phonemic Awareness

In my last post I mentioned that I have been teaching my students about phonemic awareness. 
First up, a confession: once upon a time I believed that the terms 'phonemic awareness' and 'phonics' were interchangeable. They are not. However they are strongly related and children benefit when our literacy instruction explicitly teaches both of these essential skills.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in speech. It is this ability that allows us to segment the phonemes in 'cat' (/k/ /a/ /t/) or 'boat' (/b/ /ō/ /t/). Through phonemic awareness instruction we can teach students to segment, blend, isolate, and manipulate the phonemes that make up words.

Phonics is about linking the phonemes (or sounds) within spoken language to the graphemes (or letters) that we use in our written language.

Clearly, if students have a strong grounding in phonemic awareness, then they will be better able to link these phonemes to graphemes. This should result in a stronger base for students to  build their literacy learning on.

So there is not really an argument about whether phonemic awareness should be taught to our students. However, there is plenty of debate about how much phonemic awareness instruction students need and what exactly this should look like.
In one camp there are those that claim that phonemic awareness could be done in the dark. I, for one, would prefer to leave the lights on, and not just so I can see the smiles on my students' faces.

It is important to keep the end goal in mind: I want my students to be proficient readers. Phonemic awareness is important, but it is not sufficient. Therefore my students are best served if I can ensure quality instruction in phonemic awareness while introducing graphemes as early as possible.  Coincidentally, today I received an email from a popular commercially available phonemic awareness program stating that they have adapted their program to have "greater phoneme/grapheme connections".

At the start of our foundation year, a lot of our phonemic awareness instruction is done without graphemes (and could theoretically be completed blindfolded).

However, as soon as I start introducing grapheme-phoneme correspondences I begin incorporating them into our phonemic awareness activities.
I might ask students to :

• identify the initial phoneme of a word and then ask them to hold up a card with it written on.
• segment a word orally and then write the word.
• isolate the vowel sound in the middle of a word and then have them point to the corner of the room where the corresponding grapheme is.

Each of these tasks has the benefit of simultaneously working on phonemic awareness and phonics skills. I do need to be mindful of the tasks that I am asking my students to complete and the different ways that graphemes can represent phonemes. However it means that my students are getting regular practise at encoding words. This allows me to be responsive in my teaching as I give them feedback and clarify my instruction.

​This led me to the query below:

While Weebly's embed code is malfunctioning, you just get a screenshot.

I agree with 33.8% and think that they should remain as separate phonemes. Let me explain why.

Last year, I noticed that my students were accurately writing many words. There was a bit of confusion about which grapheme to use when representing the /k/ sound in monosyllabic words (sock, stick, pack, etc.). You may have noticed a pattern already. I taught this pattern to my students.

My students were pretty quick to let me know about a missing gap.
Words like 'six', 'max' or 'fox' started causing issues. I realised that any time I came across the letter 'x' I was teaching the /k/ and /s/ phonemes as one unit. This makes some sense because they are represented by one grapheme in these words.
However to a 5-year-old child they are clearly two distinct phonemes. Asking them to segment the words 'socks' and 'fox' should result in identifying the same number of phonemes. I was inadvertently overcomplicating the task because of the additional knowledge I have.
This is exactly the gap that exists between the knowledge of novices and experts that I try to avoid.

This year I have been clearer in my expectations. If I want students to segment a word into phonemes, then I need to hold myself to the same standard and recognise individual phonemes.
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