Phonemes
A phoneme is a speech sound. It is the smallest unit of language and has no inherent meaning. The word "sun" has three phonemes: /s/ /u/ /n/.
- Although there are 26 letters in the English language, there are approximately 40 phonemes, or sound units, in the English language. (NOTE: the number of phonemes varies across sources.)
- Sounds are represented in 250 different spellings. For example, the phoneme, or sound, /f/ can be spelled in several ways: ph, f, gh, ff.
- The sound units (phonemes) are not inherently obvious and must be taught. The sounds that make up words are "coarticulated;" that is, they are not distinctly separate from each other.
Phonemic Awareness (PA) is:
- the ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds (Yopp, 1992; see References).
- essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system, because letters represent sounds or phonemes. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.
- fundamental to mapping speech to print. If a child cannot hear that "man" and "moon" begin with the same sound or cannot blend the sounds /rrrrrruuuuuunnnnn/ into the word "run", he or she may have great difficulty connecting sounds with their written symbols or blending sounds to make a word.
- essential to learning to read in an alphabetic writing system.
- a strong predictor of children who experience early reading success.
Phonemic Awareness Development Continuum

Examples of Phonemic Awareness Skills
- Sound and Word discrimination: What word doesn't belong with the others: "cat", "mat", "bat", "ran"? "ran"
- Rhyming: What word rhymes with "cat"? bat
- Syllable splitting: The onset of "cat" is /k/, the rime is /at/
- Blending: What word is made up of the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/? "cat"
- Phonemic segmentation: What are the sounds in "cat"? /k/ /a/ /t/
- Phoneme deletion: What is "cat" without the /k/? "at"
- Phoneme manipulation: What word would you have if you changed the /t/ in cat to an /n/? "can"