Discover what the phonemic awareness skill of phoneme segmentation is and why it is so important for learning to read and write. Learn how to effectively teach this skill according to the science of reading research.

If you're teaching young children to read and write, you no doubt have heard the term phoneme segmentation before. Phoneme segmentation is a critical skill for both decoding (the ability to read words accurately and fluently) and encoding (the ability to write and spell words correctly). 

Why is it so important? In this blog post, we will explore this beginner reading and writing skill and how it fits into the literacy continuum. 

What is Phoneme Segmentation?

Phoneme segmentation is the process of breaking down words into their individual sounds or phonemes. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound. 

Children with this skill know how to isolate the individual phonemes (sounds) that make up a spoken word and can separately pronounce each sound in order. 

​This important skill helps students learn the relationships between letters, letter patterns, and sounds.

There are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. This understanding - the alphabetic principle underlies the ability to read and write in alphabetic languages like English and involves two key components:

1. Letter-Sound Correspondence: Recognising that specific letters or groups of letters (graphemes) correspond to specific sounds (phonemes) in spoken language. For example, understanding that the letter "m" represents the sound /m/ as in moon.

2. The Use of These Correspondences for Reading and Writing: Applying this understanding to read (decode) written words by blending the sounds together and to write (encode) words by segmenting the sounds and choosing the corresponding letters.

Understanding the alphabetic principle is critical for early literacy development.

It enables children to decode new words they encounter by sounding them out and to spell words phonetically by breaking them down into their component sounds. Understanding how the alphabetic principle works depends on understanding that all words can be broken down or segmented into phonemes.

It is not that different from understanding that sentences can be segmented into words but phoneme segmentation is much more difficult. 

Why is Phoneme Segmentation Difficult?

Phoneme segmentation can be a challenging skill for young learners. Phonemes, the smallest speech sounds, don't hold meaning on their own like words do and that can make it hard for children to grasp.

When words are spoken quickly, distinguishing these individual sounds becomes even more difficult. I have found some of my children find it hard to recognise the distinct sounds in words, partly because phonemes can sound slightly different depending on who says them or the words they're in.

This variability makes phoneme segmentation seem unnatural and tricky to learn. However, with the right activities and consistent practice, I know children can learn to master this important skill.

More tips on how to teach phoneme segmentation will follow.

An Example of Phoneme Segmentation

The best way to understand how segmenting works is with a few examples.

For example, the word cat has three phonemes. Children competent at phoneme segmentation can hear the three phonemes and break the spoken word “cat” into three parts: /k/ /a/ /t/.

When they do this, they will be thinking about sounds and not spelling.

For spelling and writing exercises, these sounds will be represented in writing using the graphemes ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’. This is an encoding skill.

Phoneme segmentation is also an important decoding skill. 

Children learning to read need to understand the relationships between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes).  When students come across the written word cat, for example, they need to be able to segment or sound out the word into the three phonemes.

For another example, let’s look at the four-phoneme word purple, /p/ /ur/ /p/ /le/. By breaking words down into individual sounds, children can learn to spell words more accurately.

Phoneme segmentation is essential in developing reading and spelling skills. To decode and write words, children must be able to: 

• break the word down into its individual sounds 

• select the letters or graphemes that represent these sounds.

From these examples, we can see how segmenting words allows children to take a word apart, identify its different sounds, and then piece them back together. 

Combining sounds to form words is called blending, and in the next section, we’ll look at how blending is related to segmenting.

What is the Difference Between Phoneme Blending and Segmenting?

Phoneme blending and segmenting are both phonemic awareness skills that help children learn to read and write. However, they are quite different skills. 

Phoneme blending is the ability to blend or join individual sounds together to make a word.

Phoneme segmentation is the ability to break apart a word into its individual sounds. 

For example, you can blend the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/to get the word cat, and you can segment the spoken word “cat” into the sounds /k/ /a/ /t/.

Blending sounds is useful for reading and decoding words, and segmenting sounds is more useful for spelling and writing or encoding. Both are vital skills that help children develop phonemic awareness, which is the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words.

Interested in learning more about blending and exploring some good ideas to help your students master this decoding skill? Check out this blog post: Fun Phoneme Blending Activities for Phonemic Awareness

The Role of Phoneme Segmentation in Reading and Writing

If you can’t segment a word, you cannot write it, and if you can’t blend the sounds to make a word, you can’t read it. Segmenting and blending are fundamental reading and writing skills. They need to be explicitly taught and you need to make sure your students are completely confident with these important phonemic awareness skills.

Phoneme segmentation is a phonemic awareness strategy that directly relates to

• encoding or spelling in writing

• and decoding in reading.

When children learn to separate sounds, they hear a whole word and then can break it up into all the individual sounds they hear. This skill is essential for developing writing skills.

For children to write or spell words, they must first be able to break a spoken word down into its component sounds.

This is an oral phonemic awareness skill and is not about the written word. 

Segmenting involving the written word will come later in phonics lessons. 

Phoneme segmentation is also an essential reading skill. For students to decode words, they must be able to

1. Recognise and isolate the letters (graphemes) representing the individual sounds in any unknown written word.

2. Sound out each grapheme.

3. Blend the sounds together to decode the new word successfully.

These are important phonics skills that develop after children have phonemic awareness.

Teaching Tip: Because segmenting involves identifying the individual sounds (phonemes) in a word, students should be given opportunities to practice segmenting compound words, isolating initial sounds in words and recognising onset and rime, before they are expected to segment the individual sounds in a word. 

Segmenting is best taught through direct and explicit instruction. And, of course, practised through hands-on play-based activities.

Phonemic Awareness and Why It Is Important

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. It is an essential skill that helps children learn to read and write. In fact, research has shown children with strong phonemic awareness skills perform better in literacy lessons at school.

In this section, we will explore the importance of phonemic awareness and its relationship with phonological awareness, decoding, fluency, and orthographic mapping.

Phonemic Awareness vs Phonological Awareness

Phonemic awareness is often confused with phonological awareness, but there is a distinct difference between the two. 

Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is a broad umbrella term. While phonemic awareness focuses specifically on phonemes, phonological awareness includes a broader understanding of sound structures in language, including syllables, onset and rime, and phonemic manipulation. 

Phonemic awareness is a crucial subskill within the larger framework of phonological awareness.

You can learn more about phonological awareness and phonemic awareness here in this blog post: Teaching Phonological Awareness, Syllables and Phonemic Awareness

Decoding and Fluency

Decoding, the ability to translate written words into spoken language, relies heavily on phonemic awareness. When children can segment and blend individual phonemes, they are ready to decode unfamiliar words. 

Successful decoding happens when children can translate written words into spoken words. To do this, they need to recognise letter patterns and understand how these groups of letters represent sounds or phonemes. Decoding is a fundamental skill in learning to read.

Without strong decoding skills, students will struggle with reading fluency and comprehension. For students to be fluent readers who understand what they are reading, they need to decode words quickly and accurately. When children can recognise and manipulate phonemes effortlessly, they develop a smoother reading rhythm and overall fluency.

Strong phonemic awareness significantly improves reading fluency and the ability to read text accurately, smoothly, and with expression.

Phoneme segmentation is critical in students’ ability to decode. When children understand that words are made up of different sounds, they can begin to map these sounds onto written letters (graphemes) - this is the essence of decoding. 

Orthographic Mapping and Phonics

Orthographic mapping refers to the process of connecting sounds (phonemes) to their corresponding written symbols (graphemes). This skill is crucial for proficient reading and spelling. 

Phonemic awareness lays the groundwork for this mapping process, as children learn to recognise and manipulate phonemes orally before applying this knowledge to written words in phonics. 

So phonemic awareness is all about the sounds in oral language, and phonics is all about the sounds in print.

Strong phonemic awareness helps children transition from spoken language to written text. Don’t rush to start formal phonics lessons, especially at the start of Prep or kindergarten.

I have found investing the time to explicitly teach phonemic awareness, students will not only develop the foundation needed to decode words accurately and fluently but also develop a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between sounds and eventually, the symbols in our written language. 

If you are looking for some effective strategies for teaching phonemic awareness, this blog post: 12 Effective Strategies for Teaching Phonemic Awareness has the phonemic awareness activities I have had the most success with in my classroom.

Levels of Phonemic Awareness

There are four main levels of phonemic awareness. 

1. Phoneme isolation- hearing the sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

2. Blending phonemes to form words.

3. Segmenting phonemes within words.

4. Manipulating phonemes to make new words. This includes phoneme addition, deletion and substitution.

This blog post is about the third skill – segmenting phonemes.

Phoneme isolation is discussed in another blog post: 9 Practical Sound Discrimination Activities. This post explores both speech and non-speech sounds and offers some fun and easy phoneme isolation activities your students will love.

Looking for phoneme blending ideas? Check out this blog post: Fun Phoneme Blending Activities. In it, I share some of my favourite blending activities and tried-and-tested strategies. Your students will be decoding and blending sounds to make words in no time.

Phoneme Segmentation and Phonics

Phoneme segmentation is closely related to phonics, which is the relationship between sounds and letters. 

The English language uses 26 alphabet letters to record 44 different phonetic sounds. Your students need to learn the names of the letters and those 44 speech sounds as well. 

Students learning to read and write also need to learn how to segment, blend, and manipulate speech sounds to make words.

When children have a strong understanding of phoneme segmentation, they are better able to understand the phoneme-grapheme correspondence or the relationship between sounds and letters.  

A SPECIAL NOTE: Yes, young children need to understand phonemes and develop their phonemic awareness skills, but they don't have to fully grasp phonemic awareness before you can start lessons on letters and phonics. 

Phonemic awareness continues to develop as children are exposed to language orally and in print. 

Activities requiring phoneme manipulation and other advanced literacy skills related to reading, writing, and spelling will all develop together. It’s a symbiotic relationship – they will all support each other's growth. 

Once your children can recognise the first sound in a word, you can start early phonics lessons. 

I have found teaching children how sounds occur in different positions of words (initial, final, and medial) can help some children with the later task of segmenting whole words into single phonemes. 

Phoneme Segmentation and the Science of Reading

The science of reading is a body of research that explores how children learn to read and the best-practice strategies we should use to teach them. One of the key findings of the science of reading research is that phonemic awareness is a critical component of reading development.

Reading Research on whether phoneme awareness instruction in kindergarten makes any difference in early word recognition or the development of spelling skills found that teaching phoneme segmentation in phonemic awareness lessons combined with lessons connecting the phonemic segments to alphabet letters, significantly improved the early reading and spelling skills of kindergarten children. However, lessons in letter names and letter sounds alone did not significantly improve students' segmentation, early reading, or spelling skills.

Teachers must understand how children learn to segment sounds in words if they want to implement an effective literacy program. Yopp (1988) noted that while segmenting sounds is challenging for young learners, there are strategic approaches educators can use to scaffold this skill. 

Lewkowicz (1980) and Yopp (1992) recommended starting with the largest units of sounds—syllables. First, work with compound words, followed by the largest subsyllabic units like those found in onset and rime, and then progress to whole-word segmentation.

Another helpful strategy suggested in a lot of the research (Ball & Blachman, Bradley & Bryant, Griffith & Olson, and Lewkowicz) is to use visual and tactile cues like Elkonin boxes – also known as sound boxes. These are excellent phonological awareness tools that help young children segment words into individual sounds. 

You can make your own Elkonin boxes. Just draw one box for each sound in a target word. Children push a token into each box as they say each of the specific phonemes in the word. 

Using pre-printed segmenting picture cards can give students a hands-on way to practice phoneme segmentation and counting skills. These valuable resources are also a great way for students to see the number of phonemes in a word. 

It is suggested that you give students a card with a picture representing a simple word above a matrix with boxes representing each phoneme in the word. The teacher demonstrates the segmenting skill by saying the word slowly and pushing a counter into a box for each phoneme. The students then join in, saying the word segments with the teacher as they slide counters in the boxes. 

This interactive say-it-and-move-it activity (Ball & Blachman, 1991) gradually shifts responsibility to the children, who take turns segmenting the word with counters. Over time, visual aids like the boxes and pictures are phased out, and this encourages the children to segment words independently. 

Want a time saver?

I have a set of over 200 printable Elkonin boxes already done for you. They will add a fun interactive element to your literacy centers, investigation areas and explicit teaching lessons.

Oh - and they can be used over and over throughout the year! In your phonics lessons, you can use these boxes again to support phoneme-grapheme mapping (the alphabetic principle). They are the perfect way for students to transition from phonemic awareness to phonics. 

Effective Strategies for Teaching Phoneme Segmentation

As we have seen in the recent research, phoneme segmentation is a vital skill that helps students reach phonological awareness benchmarks. Along with the other three necessary skills for phonemic awareness, you need to include phoneme segmentation in your lesson plans.

If you are interested in teaching phoneme segmentation, make sure to check out my supporting blog post: 22 Phoneme Segmentation Activities for Phonemic Awareness. It explains how to teach this important phonemic awareness skill effectively and has 22 practical activities suitable for the whole class and small groups. 

Now you know what phoneme segmentation is and how important it is for children learning to read and write, jump straight to the next step. Discover the best strategies and activities for teaching phoneme segmentation in kindergarten and grade one.