Training Wheels for Literacy - A New Way of Thinking About Learning to Read

More on: Two Core Processes

Phonemic Awareness:

Phonemic Awareness: It’s the hottest topic in education
National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center

Phonemic awareness is knowledge that spoken words are made up of tiny segments of sound, referred to as phonemes. For example, the words "go" and "she" each consist of two phonemes.
National Reading Panel Report

The term phonological awareness refers to a general appreciation of the sounds of speech as distinct from their meaning. When that insight includes an understanding that words can be divided into a sequence of phonemes, this finer-grained sensitivity is termed phonemic awareness.
National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties

Experimental research on children's conscious awareness of speech sounds in spoken words has been carried out for at least twenty years. This manifest sensitivity to speech sounds is called phonemic (or phonological) awareness (PA). It now is well-established that children who have developed PA gain written word recognition skills better than do children who lack PA
National Right to Read Foundation – Dr.Patrick Groff

...studies have confirmed that there is a close relationship between phonemic awareness and reading ability, not just in the early grades but throughout the school years.
National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties

Lack of phonemic awareness seems to be a major obstacle for learning to read. This is true for any language, even Chinese.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Letter/Sound Combination:

Moreover, if the letter-sound code (phonics) is not taught, all reliable studies concur that poor readers and nonreaders will not become fluent readers. The most significant predictor of comprehension is the ability to decode isolated words rapidly, accurately, and fluently.
National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center

Visual processes initiate word identification and immediately trigger other processes that complete it, including, most importantly, phonological decoding processes, which concern the correspondences between printed letters and the sounds of the language, especially phonemes, the small sound units within spoken and heard words.
National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties

These early connections between print and speech forms can drive a rapid transition to real reading. Indeed, the combination of these print-sound connections along with phonological sensitivity are critical factors in reading acquisition
National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties

Letter knowledge, which provides the basis for forming connections between the letters in spellings and the sounds in pronunciations, has been identified as a strong predictor of reading success
National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators

Phonemic Awareness and Letter/Sound Combinations:

…instruction in alphabetic literacy, particularly regarding the correspondences between letters and phonemes, in turn appears to facilitate further growth in phonological (especially phonemic) awareness.
National Research Council Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties

In a number of these studies, the teaching of phonemic awareness has occurred in conjunction with letter-sound instruction, a process described by Hatcher et al. (1994) as a "phonological linkage"

Children in (such) dual-input programs demonstrate more improvement in reading and spelling than those exposed to a solely oral phonemic awareness program. Presumably the reason for this advantage lies with the manner in which phonemic awareness provides a signpost to beginning readers that there is a logic to the reading process. Ehri (1998) asserts that it is not until students appreciate how our alphabet is designed to represent speech in phonemic form that most phonemic awareness development occurs.

Share (1995) has argued that without the induction of the alphabetic principle, skilled reading (implying the use of a generative strategy capable of decoding novel words) will not occur.
Dr. Kerry Hempenstall in Education News.org

The most powerful interventions that have been identified for reading disabilities to date consist of a combination of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, explicit instruction in sound-symbol relationships or in mapping sound to print (the alphabetic principle), and direct and integrated instruction in text reading and comprehension.
Director’s Statement - National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities

The achievement of real reading requires knowledge of the phonological structures of language and how the written units connect with the spoken units.
From the Conclusion of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties