Phonological Awareness Vs Phonics

In today’s post, I cover the distinction between phonological awareness and phonics, explaining how these foundational components play distinct yet interconnected roles in the literacy development process. My insights are heavily based on Schuel et al.’s book “The Intensive Phonological Awareness (IPA) Program,” a book that has significantly influenced my understanding in this domain.

In integrating these insights from “The Intensive Phonological Awareness (IPA) Program” with my own teaching experience, I’ve observed how critical it is to provide students with a balanced approach to literacy education. It’s not just about focusing on one aspect and neglecting the other; rather, it’s about understanding how phonological awareness and phonics complement each other.

Phonological awareness is the broader skill that encompasses recognizing and playing with the sounds in spoken language. This includes hearing rhymes, being able to clap out the number of syllables in a word, and recognizing words that start with the same sound—activities that don’t involve print.

“Phonological awareness is the ability to analyze the sound structure of language, separate from meaning.”
(Schuele et al., 2014, p. 3)

Phonics, on the other hand, is more like the bridge between spoken and written language. It is the understanding of how letters represent sounds. Phonics is where we teach students the relationship between those sounds (phonemes) and their representation in written form (graphemes).

Phonics instruction involves teaching students to decode words by sounds, helping them understand that letters and combinations of letters represent these sounds in written language. Through phonics, students learn to “sound out” words, which is a crucial skill for reading fluently and spelling accurately.

In essence, while phonological awareness centers on the auditory aspects of language (the sounds themselves), phonics introduces the alphabetic principle—connecting those sounds to written symbols. Both are essential gears in the machinery of literacy development, but they serve different functions. Phonological awareness is the soil in which the seeds of phonics are planted. Without a firm grasp of phonological awareness, students may find phonics——to be a baffling concept.

Here is a lengthy excerpt from Schuele et al.’s book “The Intensive Phonological Awareness (IPA) Program“ that clearly articulates the difference between phonological awareness and phonics:

Phonological awareness is not just another term for phonics […] Phonological awareness (and, of course, phonemic awareness) relates to the speech sounds or phonemes in words but has nothing to do with how speech sounds are represented in print. Phonological awareness involves analyzing the sounds of words, but it does not involve understanding or figuring out what letter symbol(s) is used to represent a specific speech sound. Rather, phonics involves knowledge of how single letters or letter combinations (i.e., graphemes) are used to represent speech sounds. To learn to decode words using phonics rules, a child must have some phonological awareness or, more specifically, phonemic awareness. The child must also have letter-sound knowledge (i.e., sound-symbol correspondences). Trying to learn phonics without having some phonemic awareness is, for many children, a frustrating and unsuccessful endeavor.
(Schuele et al., 2014, p. 4-5)

So, phonological awareness and phonics are not the same, but they are intimately connected. Phonological awareness lays the groundwork for phonics, and together, they build a student’s ability to read and write. Understanding the difference and how each contributes to literacy is vital for educators. It allows us to scaffold our instruction effectively, ensuring that all students have the tools they need to become proficient readers and writers.

Here is a table I created based on Schuel et al.’s insights on how to differentiate between phonological awareness and phonics by intervention tasks, learning achievements, and focus.

As you can see, the table above provides a clear comparison between phonological awareness and phonics, two foundational components in the literacy development process. To reiterate, phonological awareness is all about the auditory aspects of language. It focuses on the sound structure of words, involving skills like identifying and manipulating these sounds without any reference to written letters.

Activities might include segmenting a spoken word into its individual sounds or blending separate sounds to form a word. Achievements in phonological awareness are marked by the ability to recognize and manipulate sounds within words, such as hearing the difference in sound segments or combining sounds to make words. An example of phonological awareness in action is when a child claps out the syllables in a word like “fantastic” or identifies the first sound in “cat.”

Phonics, in contrast, deals with the print representation of sounds. It’s where students learn the relationship between letters (and letter combinations) and the sounds they represent. The focus is on decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) words based on these sound-symbol correspondences. Phonics instruction involves tasks like matching letters to their sounds and practicing spelling words by sounding them out.

The goal is to achieve fluency in reading words by decoding their letter patterns and to spell words correctly by applying phonics rules. For example, through phonics, a student learns that the letter “c” represents the /k/ sound, which helps them read the word “cat.” Similarly, they learn to spell “fish” as F-I-S-H by sounding out each segment.

To further clarify the difference between phonological awareness and phonics, here is another table I created that provides a clear distinction between activities aimed at enhancing phonological awareness, which focus on the sounds of spoken language without involving written letters, and phonics games, which directly relate those sounds to their written representations.

Final thoughts

Drawing from the insights provided by Schuel et al., it becomes evident that while phonological awareness and phonics may initially seem like overlapping areas, they each serve unique functions in literacy education. Phonological awareness is all about tuning into the sounds of language, a skill that is auditory and oral in nature. It’s a foundational skill that precedes and supports the development of phonics knowledge, which is the understanding of how those sounds are represented in written language. Without a strong base in phonological awareness, children may struggle with phonics because they might not effectively connect sounds to letters or letter combinations.

The relationship between these two components is symbiotic. Phonological awareness sets the stage for successful phonics instruction by ensuring that students have a keen sensitivity to the sounds within words. This sensitivity is what allows them to grasp the alphabetic principle—the idea that letters and letter patterns represent the sounds of spoken language. Through effective phonics instruction, students learn to apply this principle, which is crucial for reading fluently and for spelling accurately.