How to Hear the Sounds in a Word: Phonemic Awareness for Spelling

Try this before reading on. Say the word "strengths" slowly, and count the separate sounds in it. Not the letters, the sounds.

Most people land somewhere between four and nine, and many are not sure at all. The usual answer is seven: s, t, r, e, ng, th, s. Some speakers slip in a faint k before the th, which makes eight. Nine letters, seven sounds, and a word that feels like a single solid block when you say it at normal speed. That gap between how a word feels as one smooth sound and what it is actually made of sits underneath a great deal of spelling trouble, in children and adults alike.

The skill of hearing, separating and moving the individual sounds inside a spoken word has a name, phonemic awareness, and it is one of the best-studied foundations of reading and spelling. It is usually taught to five-year-olds, which leads people to assume it is for five-year-olds. It is not. This guide explains what it is, why some adults and many English learners have gaps in it, how to test yourself, and the simple exercises, most of them built around a row of boxes, that strengthen it at any age.

What phonemic awareness is, and what it is not

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that changes a word's meaning. "Cat" and "bat" differ by one phoneme, the first. "Cat" and "cut" differ by one phoneme, the middle. English has roughly forty-four of them, depending on the accent, and only twenty-six letters to spell them with, which is why so many phonemes need two or more letters: sh, th, ng, ee, igh.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice these units in spoken words and to work with them: to hear that "ship" has three sounds, to say "smile" without the s, to swap the m in "map" for a t. It is entirely about sound. You could practice it with your eyes closed.

That separates it from phonics, which is the knowledge of which letters spell which sounds. Phonics depends on phonemic awareness. You cannot match a letter to a sound you cannot isolate. A learner who hears "strengths" as a blur of four or five sounds will spell a blur of four or five letter groups, and no amount of phonics knowledge will fill in the sounds they never noticed.

Why it matters so much for spelling

To spell a word you have not memorized, you have to break it into its sounds, in order, and choose letters for each one. Every step depends on hearing the sounds clearly. Miss one and it is gone from the page. Swap two and the letters follow.

The same skill matters for words you have memorized, because of how they get stored in the first place. Linnea Ehri's research on what she calls orthographic mapping shows that a word becomes instantly spellable when each of its sounds is linked to the letters that represent it. There is a fuller explanation in our guide to how a word becomes automatic. The linking requires the sounds to be separable in the first place. A learner who cannot pick out the n in "went" has nowhere to attach the letter n, so it drops out, and "went" becomes "wet".

The research here is unusually solid. The National Reading Panel, reporting to the United States Congress in 2000, reviewed the experimental studies of phonemic awareness teaching and concluded that it improved both reading and spelling. A detailed analysis of that evidence by Ehri and colleagues, published in 2001, added some useful specifics. Instruction worked best when it connected sounds to letters rather than staying purely oral, when it focused on one or two skills rather than many, and when it was brief and regular. Programs did not have to be long to make a difference.

Why some adults cannot hear all the sounds

It may be surprising that a literate adult could have trouble hearing the sounds in a word. But phonemic awareness does not develop automatically with speech. People speak in smooth, overlapping streams, and nothing in ordinary conversation requires anyone to split a word into its phonemes.

A striking study from Portugal makes the point. In 1979, José Morais and colleagues asked adults who had never learned to read to add or remove the first sound of a spoken word, and most of them could not. Adults from the same rural region who had learned to read later in life could do it easily. The ability to hear phonemes, in other words, grows largely out of learning an alphabet. A similar study in China by Charles Read and colleagues in 1986 found that adults who read only Chinese characters struggled with the same tasks, while those who had also learned the alphabet-based pinyin system did not.

For English-speaking adults who spell badly, this means a gap in phonemic awareness is not a sign of low intelligence. It usually means that, somewhere in their early schooling, the explicit link between sounds and letters was never properly built, and they compensated by memorizing words as rough visual shapes. That works for a while. It breaks down with long words, unfamiliar words and words that contain sounds the learner never learned to notice.

There are some particular places where adults tend to lose sounds:

• Consonant clusters, where two or three consonants run together, as in "strengths", "sixths", "twelfth" and "prompt".
• Unstressed syllables, which shrink in fast speech, so that "probably" becomes "probly" and "library" becomes "libary".
• The schwa, the weak "uh" vowel that can be spelled with almost any letter, as in the second syllable of "separate". Our guide to the schwa is devoted to it.
• Nasal sounds before consonants, the m in "jump" or the n in "went", which are short and easily swallowed.

Why English learners hear differently

For people learning English as another language, there is an extra layer. Every language has its own set of phonemes, and the ear is trained from infancy to notice the differences that matter in the first language and to ignore those that do not.

So a Japanese speaker may find l and r hard to tell apart, because Japanese does not separate them. An Arabic speaker may find p and b slippery, since Arabic has b but no p. A Spanish speaker often hears and says an e before s-clusters, so "student" comes out closer to "estudent", because Spanish words do not begin with an s followed by another consonant. Speakers of many Asian languages drop or blur consonants at the ends of words, since their first language rarely has them there.

These are not errors of carelessness. They are the first language's sound system at work, and the fix is the same as for native speakers: slow, deliberate practice in hearing and separating the sounds. Our guide to why English spelling is so hard for non-native speakers covers the wider picture.

Sound boxes: the core exercise

The most useful single tool for building phonemic awareness is the sound box, often called an Elkonin box after the Soviet psychologist D. B. Elkonin, who developed the technique. It works the same way for a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old.

Draw a row of boxes, one for each sound in a word. Say the word slowly. As you say each sound, push a counter, a coin or a button, into the next box. Then say the word again at normal speed. Once you can do that reliably, replace the counters with letters: write the letter or letters for each sound in its box.

For "ship" you need three boxes: sh, i, p. For "jump", four: j, u, m, p. For "strengths", seven. The boxes do two things. They make you slow down enough to hear each sound, and they make a missing sound obvious, because an empty box stares back at you. Writing "sh" in a single box also teaches something important about English: one sound can take more than one letter.

A good progression for adults runs from short words with clusters to longer words with unstressed syllables:

The sounds listed here follow a common American pronunciation, and yours may differ slightly, which is fine. What matters is that you hear the sounds in your own speech clearly enough to write them.

Four more exercises

Beyond sound boxes, four exercises cover most of what phonemic awareness training involves. They take seconds each and can be done anywhere.

Counting. Say a word and tap a finger for each sound. Check with a sound box if unsure. Start with short words and work up to clusters.

Blending. Have someone say a word sound by sound, "f, l, a, sh", and put it back together: "flash". This is harder than it sounds for longer words and is the reverse of spelling.

Deleting. Say a word without one of its sounds. "Say 'smile' without the s." "Say 'blend' without the l." Deletion forces you to isolate a sound precisely, which is exactly what spelling needs.

Substituting. Swap one sound for another. "Change the m in 'map' to a t." "Change the i in 'ship' to an o." This builds the flexible control that lets you check a spelling by sound.

For adults and English learners, one more trick helps: say the word the way it is spelled, not the way it is usually spoken, as a private practice pronunciation. "Wed-nes-day." "Feb-ru-ary." "Lib-rar-y." Linnea Ehri and Lee Wilce showed in a 1980 study that what children know about a word's spelling actually shapes the sounds they believe they hear in it. You can put that effect to work on purpose.

A plan for the next two weeks

Phonemic awareness responds to short, regular practice better than to long sessions, which fits the evidence from the National Reading Panel. Five minutes a day is enough.

Start by listing ten words you or your child regularly misspell. For each one, say it slowly, draw the sound boxes, and see whether a sound is being lost. You will often find the error sits exactly where a sound went missing. Practice those words with boxes for a week, then write them from memory without the boxes. In the second week, add the four quick exercises to any spare minutes: counting sounds in words on signs, deleting and swapping sounds on the drive to school.

If you practice on Spelling.School, where every word is spoken by a recorded voice before you type it, you can use the same habit there: before typing, count the sounds in your head. It takes a second and catches a surprising number of errors.

The one thing to take away

Before you can spell a sound, you have to hear it. Most people who spell badly have never been taught to listen to words this carefully, and nearly everyone can learn to. Draw three boxes, say "ship", and push a coin into each one. That is where it starts, whether you are five or fifty.

Questions people ask

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and change the individual sounds, called phonemes, inside spoken words. It includes skills such as counting the sounds in a word, blending sounds into a word, and removing or swapping a sound. It is purely about sound, which distinguishes it from phonics, the knowledge of which letters spell which sounds. Research reviewed by the National Reading Panel in 2000 found that teaching it improves both reading and spelling.

Can adults improve phonemic awareness?

Yes. Phonemic awareness develops largely through learning an alphabet, and research with adults who learned to read later in life shows they gain the ability readily. Short daily practice with sound boxes, counting sounds, blending, and deleting or swapping sounds works for adults as it does for children. Many adults who spell badly find that some of their errors come from sounds they never learned to notice.

How many sounds are in the word strengths?

Strengths usually has seven sounds: s, t, r, e, ng, th, s. Some speakers add a faint k sound before the th, which makes eight. The word has nine letters, because the ng and th sounds are each spelled with two letters. Counting sounds in words like this is a useful test of phonemic awareness.

How do sound boxes help spelling?

Sound boxes, also called Elkonin boxes, are a row of squares with one square for each sound in a word. You say the word slowly and push a counter into a box for each sound, then write the letters for each sound in its box. This slows you down enough to hear every sound and makes any missing sound obvious. It also shows that one sound can need more than one letter.

Why can't I hear all the sounds in a word?

In normal speech sounds run together, and nothing in everyday conversation requires you to separate them, so many people never learn to. Consonant clusters, unstressed syllables and weak vowels are especially easy to miss. If English is not your first language, your ear may also be tuned to ignore differences that your first language does not use. Slow, deliberate practice, such as counting sounds and using sound boxes, trains the ear to hear them.

Is phonemic awareness the same as phonics?

No. Phonemic awareness is about sounds only: hearing and manipulating the phonemes in spoken words, which you could practice with your eyes closed. Phonics is about the link between those sounds and the letters that spell them. The two work together, and research suggests phonemic awareness teaching is most effective when it is connected to letters.

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