In a nutshell Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear the individual sounds in spoken words and manipulate them. You may manipulate them to form other words or break the word into parts or isolate and produce one sound or part from the word. It is tasks like changing the /c/ in cat to /b/ and recognizing that that makes the word bat. It also goes from something that simple or as simple as saying birthday without birth and knowing that makes day, to things as complex as knowing that saying picnic backwards gives you kinkip or knowing that animal without an is imal. Some of it is super easy, some of it is super hard. It seems even harder if you are learning to do it AFTER becoming a proficient reader because you automatically think of how words are spelled instead of just how they sound. So, when a proficient reader is asked to say cake backwards they often want to say ehcake instead of the correct cake. The e makes no sound going forward, so it can make no sound going backward. Fortunately, when you are working on these skills as a toddler through first grader you are more proficient at listening to language than at reading it making these tasks are simpler to learn.
Like all parts of reading and reading as a whole, there are children and people who will intuitively learn this sound and word manipulation. Also, like those other reading parts, there are many who need to be explicitly taught these skills. Which leads us to the “Why is it important?” part of the title. The simple answer is: Because it makes us better readers. The complex answer is: We don’t really know. What I mean by that is that there is a direct correlation between phonemic awareness and reading ability, but from what I have read no one knows exactly why that is the case. So, we know it matters that young children and older children, if they didn’t master it when they were young, need these skills in order to become proficient readers. What we don’t know is why.
The best news about phonemic awareness to me is that it is all aural. This means it all takes place with spoken words. The child or student doesn’t have to read anything to practice these skills. That means it is a welcome break for struggling readers and that it can be worked on with very young children. As I stated earlier, it starts very simple and gets rather complex. It has been rather fascinating to me as a reading teacher to see how some of the simplest parts of this like say birthday, now say birthday without day (which gives you birth) is NOT always an automatic and/or accurate thing for some struggling readers even if they are in the 6th, 7th or 8th grade. One of the best resources I know of to practice these skills is David Kilpatrick’s book, Equipped for Reading Success. In the book he explains more than I have here about Phonemic Awareness and also gives pages and pages of exercises and drills to use for the practice and mastery these skills.
Again the best part is that they feel like word games to most children and it can take less than a minute to practice for the day. This is the book I use with my own daughters (they are in kindergarten and second grade) to ensure they have mastered all the levels of Phonemic Awareness they need as well as with my students in Middle School.