Understanding the Shift

Shift 2: Recommitting to Phonemic Awareness Instruction

Why Phonemic Awareness Deserves Renewed Attention

For decades, educators have recognized phonemic awareness as an important component of early literacy instruction. Activities involving rhyming, identifying beginning sounds, clapping syllables, and blending spoken sounds have long been familiar features of kindergarten and primary-grade classrooms.

Yet an important question remains: Are the activities we provide actually developing the phonemic skills children need to become successful readers?

In Shifting the Balance: 6 Ways to Bring the Science of Reading into the Balanced Literacy Classroom, Jan Burkins and Kari Yates encourage educators to take a closer look at phonemic awareness instruction. Their second shift, Recommitting to Phonemic Awareness Instruction, is not simply a call to spend more time teaching sounds. Rather, it asks teachers to reconsider what phonemic awareness involves, which skills deserve instructional attention, and how teachers can recognize whether students are developing the proficiency necessary for reading and spelling.

The emphasis is on purposeful instruction informed by an understanding of how children learn to read.

Understanding What Phonemic Awareness Really Means

Phonemic awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate individual phonemes, the smallest units of sound in spoken language.

For example, the spoken word cat contains three phonemes: /k/, /ă/, and /t/. A child demonstrating phonemic awareness might identify the first sound, blend the three sounds into a word, separate the word into its individual sounds, or replace one sound to create a different word.

Although these abilities may seem straightforward to a proficient reader, they require children to attend consciously to the sound structure of language.

Phonemic awareness is part of the broader category of phonological awareness, which also includes recognizing larger sound units such as syllables, onset-rime patterns, and rhymes.

This distinction matters because a student may successfully clap the syllables in a word or recognize two rhyming words while still struggling to identify or manipulate individual phonemes.

Burkins and Yates encourage educators to recognize these differences and give appropriate attention to the specific sound-level skills that support word reading.

Moving Beyond Familiar Activities

Many traditional early literacy lessons include phonological awareness activities. Children might identify rhyming words, count syllables, or listen for words that begin with the same sound.

These experiences can contribute to children's awareness of spoken language. However, participating successfully in these activities does not necessarily demonstrate proficiency with individual phonemes.

Consider a child who can identify that cat and hat rhyme but cannot separate cat into /k/, /ă/, and /t/.

Another child may correctly identify the initial sound in sun but struggle when asked to blend /s/ /ŭ/ /n/ into the complete word.

These children are demonstrating different levels of sound awareness, and their instructional needs are not identical.

The shift encourages educators to examine whether instruction is progressing beyond general sound awareness toward the specific phonemic skills children need for decoding and spelling.

This does not require abandoning familiar activities. It requires understanding their instructional purpose and recognizing when students need more focused work with individual phonemes.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics: Connected but Different

One of the most important distinctions addressed in Shift 2 is the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics.

Phonemic awareness involves the sounds in spoken words. Phonics involves the relationships between those sounds and written letters or letter combinations.

A child can demonstrate phonemic awareness without seeing a printed word. For example, a teacher might say the sounds /m/ /ă/ /p/ and ask the child to blend them into map.

Phonics adds another dimension. The child learns that the spoken sounds correspond to the letters m, a, and p.

These abilities are closely connected, but they are not interchangeable.

A student might identify individual letter sounds accurately yet struggle to blend them into words. Another might blend spoken sounds successfully but have difficulty remembering which letters represent those sounds.

Recognizing this distinction helps teachers identify the actual source of a student's difficulty rather than assuming that knowledge of letter-sound correspondences automatically produces successful decoding.

As students develop alphabetic knowledge, integrating letters into appropriate phonemic awareness activities can help strengthen the connection between spoken and written language.

Is Phonemic Awareness Only a Prereading Skill?

Another assumption worth reconsidering is that phonemic awareness is something children develop before formal reading instruction and then leave behind.

Phonemic awareness and word reading develop in a reciprocal relationship. Awareness of individual sounds supports learning the alphabetic system, while experience connecting sounds with letters can further strengthen phonemic awareness.

This means that phonemic awareness instruction may remain important after children begin reading printed words.

For some students, phonemic awareness develops relatively quickly. Others continue to struggle with blending, segmenting, or manipulating sounds even after receiving instruction in letter-sound relationships.

Teachers therefore need to look beyond a child's grade level or familiarity with the alphabet and examine whether the student can actually perform the phonemic tasks necessary for increasingly accurate reading and spelling.

However, continued instruction should be responsive to student needs. Children who have developed strong phonemic proficiency do not necessarily benefit from prolonged practice with increasingly complex oral manipulation exercises.

The goal is not to master an endless sequence of sound activities. It is to develop the phonemic skills that support literacy.

What About Students Who Know Their Letters but Cannot Read Words?

One of the most revealing situations in early literacy instruction occurs when a child knows many letter names and sounds but struggles to decode even simple consonant-vowel-consonant words.

Imagine a student who identifies the sounds represented by m, a, and t correctly when the letters are presented individually.

When the letters appear together, however, the child cannot successfully blend them into mat. By the time the student reaches the final sound, the beginning of the word may have been forgotten.

It can be tempting to respond by providing more letter-sound drills. Yet the difficulty may not involve remembering the individual correspondences.

The student may need additional support with phoneme blending, maintaining sound sequences, or coordinating sound processing with print. Attention, working memory, and other learning factors may also contribute.

This is precisely why a deeper understanding of phonemic awareness matters.

Effective instruction begins with identifying what a student can do, what remains difficult, and which skill requires additional support.

A child who struggles with oral blending may need a different instructional response from a child who blends sounds orally but cannot connect those sounds to letters.

Recommitting Does Not Necessarily Mean Adding More

An important aspect of this shift is recognizing that effective phonemic awareness instruction does not have to require lengthy lessons or elaborate materials.

Instruction can be brief, explicit, and intentionally connected to the literacy skills students are learning.

What matters is that teachers understand the purpose of the activity, provide clear modeling and feedback, and use students' responses to guide subsequent instruction.

Rather than measuring instructional effectiveness by how many activities have been completed, educators should consider whether students are developing greater accuracy, independence, and proficiency.

For students who demonstrate difficulty, additional instruction may be necessary. For students who have already developed the targeted skills, instruction should move forward rather than continue unnecessarily.

The emphasis is on the quality and responsiveness of instruction rather than the quantity of activities.

What Is Actually Shifting?

At its heart, Shift 2 asks educators to reconsider several instructional assumptions.

Instead of assuming that phonemic awareness develops naturally for every child, teachers recognize that some students need explicit, systematic support.

Instead of treating phonemic awareness and phonics as identical, teachers understand their distinct contributions and important connections.

Instead of assuming that knowing letters and sounds guarantees successful word reading, teachers examine whether students can blend and segment phonemes and apply those abilities to print.

Instead of treating phonemic awareness as a skill that belongs exclusively before reading instruction, teachers recognize its continuing relationship with decoding and spelling.

And instead of relying on familiar activities simply because they have traditionally been part of early literacy instruction, teachers consider whether those activities are producing meaningful progress.

Final Thoughts: Instruction With Greater Purpose

The significance of Shift 2 extends beyond phonemic awareness itself. It reflects a broader principle of effective teaching: instructional practices should be guided by an understanding of how learning occurs and adjusted in response to student needs.

Phonemic awareness is not simply another item on an early literacy checklist. It is an important part of the process through which children learn to connect spoken language with written words.

For educators, recommitting to phonemic awareness means looking more closely at what children are actually learning, recognizing the differences between related literacy skills, and ensuring that instruction addresses the foundations of successful reading.

The essential question is not whether phonemic awareness is being taught. It is whether children are developing the phonemic proficiency they need to become successful readers and writers.