Knowing the demands

Although most people acquire awareness of these sound units without consciously thinking about them, many adults who are non-readers or poor readers will not have this ability. The connections between phonological awareness and reading are very strong; many researchers assert that, without phonological awareness (and, in particular, phonemic awareness), reading will not develop.²⁸

The road to proficient reading requires all readers, regardless of their age, to develop decoding (‘sounding out’) skills,²⁹ but poorly developed phonemic awareness is a roadblock to developing decoding skills. Indeed, from research findings it appears that phonemic awareness continues to develop because it is used to aid decoding: the more it is used, the more it develops until decoding becomes well established.³⁰

Learners who do not develop or who lack phonemic awareness have great difficulty understanding letter–sound relationships³¹ and therefore experience serious difficulty in learning to read and spell. Lack of phonemic awareness usually marks the start of a vicious cycle:³²