These two terms are often used interchangeably and they are related. However, they are not exactly the same. Some of the differences can be found or highlighted in looking at the roots within each word.

Let’s start with Phonemic Awareness. The root phono means sound. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in language. So Phonemic Awareness is the awareness of all the small sounds that fit together to make words in our spoken language. Then, it goes beyond just hearing all of those sounds to being able to delete them or add new ones or move the sounds around in words. All Phonemic Awareness skills are based in oral language. They are aural skills, aural meaning “relating to the ear or the sense of hearing”. A person does not have to be able to read at all to be able to learn Phonemic Awareness skills. Phonemic Awareness skills include things like rhyming (identifying and producing), segmenting words into syllables (and being able to accurately drop syllables and know what portion of the word if left), segmenting words into individual phonemes/sounds, blending individual phonemes/sounds into words, deleting individual phonemes and knowing what is left, changing individual phonemes to create new/different words.

Then there is Phonological Awareness. Since this still has the root phono in it, it still related to the sounds of our language. It includes now the root logos though which means “reason, idea or word”. Phonological Awareness is taking the knowledge of and ability to hear the multiple sounds in a word and recognizing that each of those sounds are attached to some symbols in written language. These skills are the ability to sound out a written word by knowing which sound goes with each letter or letter combination in a word. Phonemic Awareness skills should be in place PRIOR to developing Phonological Awareness skills so that a person is only learning to match sounds to symbols and they already have the ability to segment, blend and manipulate those sounds once they are matched.

One MAJOR thing to remember about both of these skills is that they need to be accurate AND automatic! In education we have often fallen short with these skills by only teaching to accuracy. However, if it is not also automatic then reading is often still labored, slow and inefficient. When measuring automaticity in his book, Equipped for Reading Success, and his subsequent assessment, the PAST, David Kilpatrick sets the measure of automaticity as being able to respond correctly within 2 seconds. This means that when you are working on letter names and sounds and you show a learner the letter b and ask for the name they should correctly name it within 2 seconds before they can be considered to have mastered that skill. It also means that if you say time and ask for a rhyming word, that the a correct answer like lime should be given within 2 seconds to be considered to have mastered producing rhymes. This rule of thumb can be used for checking to see if learners have actually mapped words later on in their reading journey by showing a word you think they have mapped and asking them to read it. You will know they have mapped it if they correctly identify the word within 2 seconds without sounding it out. This idea of teaching to accuracy AND automaticity should be applied to all areas of memorization skills and many other types of learning skills like math facts, patterning, suffix and root meanings or even vocabulary word meanings.