Sounds and stories: Teaching phonemic awareness in interactions around text

Phonemic awareness instruction is an important part of child language intervention. Activities and procedures have generally been adopted directly from experimental studies. Although effective, these methods may strike a discordant note with more holistically-oriented speech-language pathologists. This article describes an alternative approach involving teaching phonemic awareness within meaningful text experiences. By teaching phonological awareness within its contexts of use, the emergent nature of literacy acquisition and the reciprocal relationship between phonological awareness and literacy are recognized and capitalized upon. Phonemic awareness instruction then becomes part of the greater whole of meaningful, contextualized language and literacy intervention.