Phonemic Awareness

http://www.ldonline.org/article/6254

Phonological Awareness: Instructional and Assessment Guidelines

By: David J. Chard and Shirley V. Dickson (1999)

No area of reading research has gained as much attention over the past two decades as phonological awareness. Perhaps the most exciting finding
emanating from research on phonological awareness is that critical levels of phonological awareness can be developed through carefully planned
instruction, and this development has a significant influence on children’s reading and spelling achievement (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Bradley & Bryant,
1985; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1991; O’Connor, Jenkins, Leicester, & Slocum, 1993).

http://www.reading.org/resources/issues/positions_phonemic.html

The position statement of the International Reading Association.

Research has shown that a child’s awareness of the sounds of spoken words is a strong predictor of his or her later success in learning to read. Teachers
of young children can encourage play with spoken language as part of a broader literacy program. Nursery rhymes, riddles, songs, poems, and
read-aloud books that manipulate sounds are all effective vehicles.

http://www.readingrockets.org/articles/408

By: Marilyn J. Adams, Barbara Foorman, Ingvar Lundberg, and Terri Beeler
(1998)

Research shows that the very notion that spoken language is made up of sequences of little sounds does not come naturally or easily to human
beings. The small units of speech that correspond to letters of an alphabetic writing system are called phonemes. Thus, the awareness that
language is composed of these small sounds is termed phonemic awareness.

http://www.kidsource.com/kidsource/content2/phoemic.p.k12.4.html

Author: Roger Sensenbaugh

Kidsource Online has a wonderful selection of information regarding research and practice on phonological and phonemic awareness and learning to read. Educators are always looking for valid and reliable predictors of educational achievement. One reason why educators are so interested in phonemic awareness is that research indicates that it is the best predictor of the ease of early reading acquisition (Stanovich, 1993-94), better even than IQ, vocabulary, and listening comprehension.

http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedl-letter/v14n03/3.html

In SEDL Newsletter, December 2002

Phonemic awareness is a critical skill for learning to read an
alphabetically written language. Yet a fair amount of confusion, especially
among educators, persists about what this skill is and why it is so
important. Written for practitioners, this article describes phonemic
awareness and discusses why it is a prerequisite for learning to read, how
we have come to understand its importance, why it can be difficult to
acquire, and what happens to the would-be reader who fails to acquire it.
Our discussion of phonemic awareness is framed within a particular view of
reading, to which we turn first.

This article contains important discriminations between phonemic awareness,
phonics, phonetics, and phonological awareness.