Phonics and phonological awareness have similar features. Both involve an awareness of sounds in speech, except phonological awareness does not involve print. Phonics differs from phonological awareness because it involves letters, graphemes, and individual sounds, phonemes. Phonics is the study of the relationship between these two aspects of language (Honig, Diamond, & Gulohn 2002).
Phonics instruction teaches children to become aware of the common patterns in grapheme and phoneme relationships. Using this knowledge, children are able to decode and encode unknown words independently. They do not need to visually remember the entire word, logographically. Skills taught include matching individual letters, letter combinations such as digraphs and diphthongs with their frequently corresponding sounds. The instruction involves synthesizing (blending) and analyzing (segmenting) words and word families (Honig et al. 2002).
Phonological awareness is an umbrella term that covers sound awareness in a variety of speech patterns (Honig et al. 2002). Phonological awareness occurs when a child recognizes that speech sounds can be broken into parts, which include words, syllables, and phonemes. Sentences are made of individual words, words are made up of syllables, syllables are made of onset and rimes, and onset and rimes are made of phonemes. If a child is not aware of phonology, successful instruction of phonics cannot occur.
