Importance of Phonemic Awareness

In the book Leaning to Read is Child's Play, (Maunz, Matthews, and Klein, 2001), the authors explain how as they worked with the children, they "began to understand the role the ear plays in reading. Not the role of hearing per se, but the ability of a child's brain to perceive the individual sounds of spoken language " p. 32). They discovered that for a child to learn to read, the child must go through a transformation period in which he "learns to focus on the sounds in words rather than their meaning" p. 32). This is why rhyming, blending and playing with sounds is so salient for a child in the early reading stage.