The Importance of Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read
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. Reading, or
more precisely reading comprehension, is the ability to derive
meaning, particularly that intended by the author, from the
printed word Ñ in short, reading is understanding the meaning of
written language. The major difference between the written and
the spoken word is not what is being communicated, but how the
communication is taking place, by eye