Phonemic Awareness

So, why is Phonemic Awareness so important in the reading process? First and foremost, Phonemic Awareness lays the foundation of phonics instruction. This instruction of Phonemic Awareness helps children acquire fluent and precise decoding skills. Children who do not have this instruction have trouble connecting speech sounds to letters which ultimately leads to the fact that the teaching of phonics will not make much sense to them. Phonemic Awareness is crucial when learning to decode language. Torgesen and Mathes (2000) give three reasons for the importance of learning Phonemic Awareness: 1) "It helps children understand the alphabetic principle," 2) "It helps children notice the regular ways that letters represent sounds in words," and 3) "It makes it possible to generate possibilities for words in context that are only partially sounded out."