Sorting out phonemic awareness
 
What phonemic awareness is:

Copeland, Winsor, & Osborn pp. 28-29: "Phonemic Awareness and Sound-Symbol Correspondences. To internalize orthographic patterns, children must understand the principle that English written words are made up of letters that fairly closely correspond to the phonemes, or sounds, of spoken words (Griffith, 1991)."

Note that 'phonemic awareness' and 'sound-symbol correspondences' are named separately, suggesting that they are not the same thing.

"the principle that English written words are made up of letters that fairly closely correspond to the phonemes, or sounds, of spoken words" -- this is the alphabetic principle.

Continuing the quotation from pp. 28-29: "Basic to such an understanding is phonemic awareness, a type of metalinguistic awareness that involves understanding that words are composed of individual distinct sounds, and that these sounds can be manipulated."

This paragraph lays out the fact that phonemic awareness is a foundation for understanding the alphabetic principle; it is not the alphabetic principle itself. Note that the authors state that "phonemic awareness involves understanding that words are composed of individual distinct sounds, and that these sounds can be manipulated" (italics added). So this is awareness of sounds, not letters. A child can develop phonemic awareness without any exposure at all to letters or print.

On page 30, the authors launch into the details on phonemic awareness: "To this point, we have referred to phonemic awareness in a global manner. Actually, phonemic awareness can be thought to include several specific types of abilities. Adams (1990) provided a continuum of the kinds of activities associated with phonemic awareness: (a) knowing nursery rhymes; (b) noting similarites and differences among words on the basis of initial, final, or medial sounds; (c) blending given individual sounds to form a word; (e) segmenting a pronounced word into its series of phonemes or indicating how many phonemes are in a pronounced word; (f) manipulating phonemes by pronouncing what a word would become if a given initial, medial, or final sound were removed, or manipulating phonemes by adding phonemes to a word pronounced."

Notice that none of these abilities involves understanding letters or print; all can be conducted as purely oral activities. If these skills are practiced without the involvement of letters or written words, they will still be effective acitivities for developing phonemic awareness.

The children who have practiced such oral acitivities will then have the necessary foundation for understanding how an alphabet works: They will be ready to begin to associate individual sounds with the graphemes (letters and letter combinations) of the English spelling system. This is the first step in spelling skills: becoming aware of sound-symbol correspondences (that is, becoming aware that the letters in written words stand for phonemes in spoken words). As sound-symbol correspondences become established in the child's cognition, the child can begin to encode and decode words. Encoding is going from sound to print: choosing a grapheme to stand for each phoneme in a word, and writing the graphemes from left to right in a connected word. Decoding is going from print to sound to word: identifying which letters are in a written word, matching these to phonemes, and realizing which spoken word is therefore represented by the printed word by pronouncing the sounds in the correct sequence.

So phonemic awareness is not a spelling skill; it is a metalinguistic skill which makes a child consciously aware of one aspect of the English phonological system (its phoneme inventory). It is the necessary groundwork for learning to use an alphabetic spelling system, but it is not the learning of spelling itself.

Many children develop phonemic awareness simultaneously with early literacy instruction, especially children trained through phonics, or children whose caregivers explicitly talk with them in reading sessions about the pronunciations that go with various letters and how these are arranged in different orders in different words. But not all children have these kind of literacy experiences at home or in pre-school. For such children, explicit phonemic awareness activities will be absolutely necessary for cultivating reading readiness. This is one reason why children who are read to a lot at home, and whose caregivers spend time talking to them about letters and print, are more successful in learning to read than children whose caregivers do not engage in such activities.

How phonemic awareness is acquired

On p. 31:  " ... the ability to deal explicitly with phonetic segments is not acquired spontaneously as a consequence of cognitive growth, but rather it is the result of some kind of training."

 On p. 34: "Other research has shown that some children do discover the phonemic structure of language even when it is not explicitly taught ... we need to make sure all students make steady gains in phonemic awareness once they have embarked on reading instruction so that they can profit from it."

On p. 30: " ... acquiring phonemic awareness can be enhanced through instruction ... some form of phonemic awareness is necessary for learning to read alphabetic languages [sic] successfully (see, e.g., Juel, 1988)."

(The reason for 'sic' here is that the authors have goofed -- languages cannot be alphabetic; only spelling systems can be alphabetic. Any writing system, whether ideographic, syllabic, or alphabetic, can be adapted to write virtually any language. The language exists independently of the spelling system. The spelling system is a way of representing the sounds of the language on paper. It is not the language itself.)
 
These quotes make clear that, unlike acquisition of a phonological system, acquisition of phonemic awareness is not guaranteed for every normal child. Phonemic awareness is apparently NOT one of the language skills that we are pre-programmed for. Instruction that develops phonemic awareness -- whether or not it takes place simultaneously with literacy instruction -- assures that ALL children have a chance to develop phonemic awareness, and thus have the necessary background to learning how to spell.

On p. 34: "... the use of letters contributes to the effectiveness of phonemic awareness training."

This suggests that it is a good idea to combine phonemic awareness activities with letter-sound correspondence activities.

Reference:
Copeland, Kathleen, Pamela Winsor, and Jean Osborn. 1994. Phonemic awareness: A consideration of research and practice. In Lehr, Fran and Jean Osborn, eds., Reading, language, and literacy: Instruction for the twenty-first century. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.