What's the difference between phonemic awareness and phonics?

A common misconception for teachers is to think phonemic awareness and phonics are the same. However, they are very different concepts.

Phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors of a child's ability to read words. But believe it or not, phonemic awareness has nothing to do with print! Phonemic awareness is about hearing and manipulating the sounds in our language. Phonemic awareness is done with your ears. It can be done in the dark. There is no print involved. Phonics, on the other hand, requires your eyes. Phonics is the teaching of sound-symbol relationships. However, students need to learn how sounds make up the words in our language before they can start reading and spelling. This is why phonemic awareness is such a critical skill set.

Phonemic awareness is part of a broader set of skills called phonological awareness. The development of phonological awareness skills starts very early on in life. When a baby starts to distinguish the difference between a dog barking and its mother's voice, the brain is being primed for phonological awareness. Eventually that child is able to determine that the sentence, "I like to drink coffee," is made up of 5 different words. Identifying the separate words in a sentence is phonological awareness. The the child starts to notice the number of syllables in words. The word "coffee" has 2 syllables. Counting the number of syllables in a word is phonological awareness. Eventually the child will be able to identify individual sounds in a word. For example, the word "coffee" is made up of 4 sounds: /k/ /o/ /f/ /ē/. As the child works with the smallest unit of sound, known as a phoneme, we call this phonemic awareness. This graphic helps to illustrate the connection between phonological awareness and phonemic awareness skills.

Here are a few useful videos: