Unlike spoken language, reading and writing are not innate. As noted in Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, written language is only around 5,000 years old, so it’s too new for our brains to have evolved structures for reading and writing. That’s where explicit reading instruction comes in. Teaching phonological awareness skills plays a crucial role in building a foundation for reading and writing success.

Building on a related blog post on phonological awareness, we will explore the progression of phonological awareness skills. Additionally, we’ll delve into the development of phonological awareness skills, new research on the importance of attending to the most critical skills, and ways you can support developing readers.

What are phonological awareness skills?

The Institute of Education Sciences describes phonological awareness as the “understanding that speech can be broken down into parts, or units of sound, and the ability to manipulate those parts.” Phonological awareness in combination with phonemic awareness are essential to children developing the alphabetic principle, that is the understanding that sounds in the spoken language are represented by letters and combinations of letters in written language. Together these concepts help developing readers and writers understand the relationships between spoken and written language.

Phonological awareness is an umbrella term with four distinct skills under the umbrella:

• Word awareness: Students can understand rhyming words, alliteration, and sentence segmentation.
• Syllable awareness: Students can break up a word into three syllables and sound them out.
• Onset and rime awareness: Students recognize the sounds of the starting and ending parts in a word.
• Phonemic awareness: Students understand that a word is made up of phonemes, or sounds.

When does the development of phonological awareness skills take place?

The development of phonological awareness starts once children begin to speak. In Book Smart: How to Develop and Support Successful, Motivated Readers, Dr. Anne Cunningham and Dr. Jamie Zibulsky recommend that because of phonological awareness’s essential role in beginning reading and spelling, parents and guardians should aim to cultivate it so that children can take full advantage of the formal reading instruction in elementary school.

According to Reading Rockets, for students to have a solid phonological awareness foundation, they must have basic listening skills, an extensive vocabulary, the ability to imitate and produce basic sentence structures, and the ability to properly use language to express needs, react to others, comment on experience, and understand what others intend.

5 levels of phonological awareness skills

Families and educators can develop phonological awareness at each level by varying the difficulty of the activities used to teach the skills. These activities fall on a continuum of complexity, with the most difficult being phonemic awareness activities. Researchers David Chard and Shirley Dickson illustrated this continuum of complexity, which we recreated below.

1. Rhyming songs fall at the less complex end of the continuum. At this level, students begin to understand how letters and sounds correspond when practicing rhyming exercises.
2. Sentence segmentation activities help students understand that sentences comprise a series of words. 
3. Syllable segmentation and blending activities fall at the center of the continuum. At this level, students understand that words consist of syllables and that different sounds blended together will make different words.
4. Onset-rime blending and segmentation activities help students split up words into onsets and rimes and understand the sound to start the word and the rest of the word as a separate sound.
5. Blending and segmenting individual phonemes is the most complex level. Activities help students understand that words are made up of individual sounds, or phonemes, and that you can combine them together to create words.

These levels of phonological awareness can be thought of as a continuum of learning, and the levels overlap when students acquire the skills at each level. While the above graphic organizes levels of phonological awareness by approximate complexity, it does not give a specific order in which students develop phonological awareness skills, which will happen differently for every learner. The Institute of Education Sciences explains, “Phonological awareness is not sequential, where children must master one level before moving to the next level. . . . Children may reach multiple levels of phonological awareness at the same time.”

Why is it important to learn phonological awareness skills?

A recent large-scale meta-analysis has shown that phonological awareness is a key indicator of reading success, with lack of phonological awareness being a key contributor to reading difficulties, including dyslexia. One article notes that children with well-developed phonological awareness are in a position to become good readers over time, and children with poor phonological awareness almost always need extra support in reading. Fortunately, early intervention can help children who are encountering reading difficulties.

Additionally, phonological awareness can enhance spelling abilities, which, in turn, supports writing. For example, research has found that phonological awareness, specifically phonemic awareness, including sound-to-letter recognition is predictive of spelling ability, a key contributor children’s emerging writing skills.

Which are the most critical phonological awareness skills?

All the phonological awareness skills are critical. However, phonemic awareness is the most complex and crucial skill on the hierarchy of phonological awareness skills. Phonemic awareness is the ability to perceive (i.e., hear) phonemes—which are the individual speech sounds that make up the smallest unit of spoken language—within words, as well as the ability to manipulate, combine, delete, and replace phonemes within words. As such, phonemic awareness is crucial to both learning to read (decode) and learning to spell (encode).

New research from 2024 emphasizes the importance of phonemic awareness lessons that include visual displays of the letters combined with the sounds to emphasize the auditory skills of segmenting words into sounds and blending the sounds together. Additionally, prioritizing phoneme manipulation strengthens decoding, automaticity, and oral reading fluency.

How to teach phonological awareness skills

There are plenty of ways families and teachers can develop children’s phonological awareness skills, including phonemic awareness. In Book Smart, Cunningham and Zibulsky provide a wealth of ideas to support specific phonological awareness skills. Below are a few suggestions from their book, but we recommend you check out the full book for more ways to support developing readers:

Word awareness

• Promote awareness of individual words in text
• Segment and blend words within stories
• Elongate sounds

Syllable awareness

• Play syllable awareness games
• “Feel” the syllables by keeping your hand under your chin when talking
• Sort household items by number of syllables in their names

Onset-rime awareness

• Use a child’s name in a rhyming song
• Replace initial phonemes of words in children’s songs
• Play onset-rime guessing games based on the objects you and your child see together

Phoneme awareness

• Read alliterative books
• Sing songs
• Use a mirror to look at how your mouth moves when saying different words

Additionally, check out the phonological awareness activity from Into Reading below for more support in helping students formulate words by blending sounds.

More support for phonological awareness

Developing phonological awareness skills can promote reading, spelling, and writing success. There is plenty of research and strategies you can try to encourage the development of phonological awareness both in and out of the classroom. For more on this topic, see the Shaped blogs below:

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HMH core, intervention, and supplemental programs are rooted in the science of reading. Find out more about our evidence-based approach to teaching a child to read.