Phonological awareness is an overall understanding of the sound systems of a language, for example, awareness that words are made up of combinations of sounds.
Phonemic awareness, which is the finest “grain” or level of phonological awareness, involves the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds (phonemes) within words.
A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word.
Phonological awareness includes the ability to recognise syllables, to recognise and generate rhyming words, and to separate the onset (or beginning) of a word from its rime (the cluster of letters that comes after the initial sound of a one-syllable word). For example, for the word “shop”, a child who demonstrates phonological awareness is able to recognise the onset (“sh”) and the rime (“op”). A child who has developed phonemic awareness is also able to identify the phonemes in the word “shop“ (“sh/–/o/–/p”) and understands that new words can be formed by the substitution of phonemes (“hop”, “pop”, “ship”, “shot”).
Phonological awareness and phonemic awareness apply to aural discrimination only – they do not involve the written form of words.
The relationship between spoken sounds and the letters that represent them is called phonics.