I was fascinated to discover information on how the importance of phonemic awareness was discovered. After World War II the U.S. Government looked for ways to ease the transition back into life for disabled veterans, including those who returned home blinded in battle. A young psychologist, Alvin Liberman, was tasked with creating a reading machine for the blind. The idea was to create a machine that could vocalize print as a finger ran over Braille letters.

Although the machine worked it proved too slow at articulating the individual sounds to resemble speech. Listeners found it impossible to join the machine’s sounds together to make any sense out of them. However, Liberman’s team of scientists had stumbled upon a new under¬standing of the reading process.

They had unintentionally identified the complicated relationship between the language that we read [letters] and the lan¬guage that we speak [sounds] and discovered one of the primary reasons it can be hard to learn how to read. Just as the blind listeners could not make sense out of the sounds coming from the reading machine, struggling readers have a hard time blending together the different sounds that make up a word.

Many young learners find it incredibly difficult to distinguish the small segments of sounds – “phonemic awareness”. Their difficulty has nothing to do with an ability to recognize the individual letters but what word they form when strung together. Well over a third of all beginning readers have difficulty identifying, discriminating, and isolating sounds.

Phonemes are the sounds that make up spoken words not the individual letters. For example, the word ‘on’ is made up of two phonemes: /o/ and /n/. We hear them as a single word because we blend the individual phonemes into a unit as we pronounce the word. Clusters of letters that represent single sounds (th, sh, oo, ough, or ck) are also important for children to be aware of. The word ‘though’ is not de-codable just by the individual letter sounds, there needs to be an understanding of the phonetic sounds too. Phonemes are not the sounds that letters make but the sounds of speech that can be represented by letters.

Effective reading instruction needs to include teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics. Helping your child to recognise the sounds the letters make and how they combine is as important as understanding the letters themselves.