The Effect of Phonemic Awareness of English Sounds on Reading Ability

EFL and ESL students are at a particular risk for English literacy difficulties in all skills of their language learning (i.e., reading, writing, speaking and listening). Phonemic awareness (PA) plays a significant role to help them remove their English learning difficulties which is accepted as being an important factor in English literacy abilities by previous researchers. Although there are 26 letters in the English language, but there are approximately 40 phonemes or sound units, these sounds are represented in 250 different spellings which are not inherently obvious and must be taught (Center on Teaching and Learning). One of the main problems of EFL / ESL students is reading difficulties that they are commonly caused by weaknesses in the ability to process the phonological features of language because spelling words in English is challenging work and one of the main reasons for this is that many of English words are NOT spelled as they are spoken, and causes a lot of confusion for learners to learn English.