A Test for Assessing Phonemic Awareness in Young Children

Abstract

Two decades ago few educational re searchers and practitioners were familiar with the concept of phonemic aware ness. In the last several years, however, phone mic awareness has captured the attention of many individuals in both the research commu nity and elementary classrooms, and this in terest is likely to continue for some time. What is this concept that has attracted so much at tention? Phonemic awareness, as the term sug gests, is the awareness of phonemes, or sounds, in the speech stream. It is the awareness that speech consists of a series of sounds. Most youngsters enter kindergarten lacking phonemic awareness. Indeed, few are conscious that sentences are made up of individual words, let alone that words can be segmented into phonemes. By the end of first grade, however, many (but not all) children have gained this aware ness and can manipulate phonemes in their speech. For example, they can break spoken words into their constituent sounds, saying /d/-/i/-/g/ when presented with dig; they can remove a sound from a spoken word, saying rake when asked to take the Ibl off the