A bottom-up approach to reading gives most learners exactly what they need to discover the lifelong joy of reading confidently. And yet, there are those who still struggle to gain momentum in the bottom-up approach.

The reason? It's not a flaw in the method, but a single, quiet detail that often goes unnoticed…

At its core - it's understanding the difference between Phonics and Phonemic Awareness.

What Phonemic Awareness Actually Looks Like

Phonemic awareness isn’t something you can point to on the page.

It’s the ability to notice and work with sound itself; to become adept at hearing how one sound changes, while everything else stayed the same. It’s the skill that allows a reader to hold a sound in mind, compare it to another, and feel the difference between them.

When phonemic awareness is strong, sound is perceptually alive. It takes all the benefits of the whole-language/top-down approach and synthesizes it with decoding.

When it’s weak, sound becomes something to either fixate on or rush past.

What’s important here is that phonemic awareness is not about knowing rules. It’s about tracking change. Hearing what shifted. Holding the previous sound long enough to notice the contrast.

Where Phonics Takes Over Too Soon

Phonics is about symbols. Letters. The marks on the page and the sounds we’re told they represent.

That work matters. But once letters enter the picture, they tend to take over the moment. The eye moves faster than the ear. The brain starts looking for something familiar. Meaning rushes in before sound has had time to settle.

You can see this happen in real time.

A child comes to the word ship. They notice the "s" immediately. They hesitate for a beat. Then they say “sailboat.”
It makes sense. It fits the picture. It even starts with the same letter.

An adult does something similar, just more quietly. They meet an unfamiliar word in a paragraph, skim past it, and substitute something close enough to keep the sentence moving. Later, if asked, they couldn’t tell you exactly what the word said — only what it meant.

In both cases, phonics knowledge is present. Letters are being noticed. Patterns are being recognized. But sound itself is no longer being tracked.

What’s missing isn’t effort or intelligence.
It’s auditory comparison.

Essentially, when sound drops out, comprehension becomes approximate. The reader follows the idea of the text, but not its exact meaning. That small distinction is often what determines whether reading feels effortful or whether it begins to feel profoundly rewarding.

The Difference You Can Feel When Sound Is Leading

Now, how can a teacher or pedagogy remediate? I’ve watched what happens when a reading moment is structured so that only one thing can change at a time.

No guessing.
No extra cues.
No opportunity to rely on memory.

In those moments, the reader has to stay with sound and the sound alone. Not as an abstract idea, but as an experience unfolding in time. One sound shifts. Everything else remains constant. The task becomes: Can you hear what changed?

This is phonemic awareness doing its real work.

What’s striking is how different the reader’s posture becomes. The pace slows. Attention sharpens. There’s less reaching outward and more listening inward. Sound is no longer something to escape from — it’s the primary signal. And this is precisely what continues to carry through as text grows more and more complex.

Why Guessing Becomes So Tempting

In my previous blog post, I outlined why "guessing" can be so detrimental to the development of reading skills. But it's important to recognize that guessing isn’t solely a bad habit. It’s a rational response to overload.

When too many things change at once (letters, sounds, context, meaning) the brain looks for efficiency. It predicts. It substitutes. It moves quickly toward plausibility instead of precision.

This is why guessing strategies show up so reliably when phonemic awareness hasn’t fully settled. They’re managing complexity.

The problem is that prediction itself will never become reliable enough to carry the full weight of advanced reading.

What Changes When Sound Is Stabilized First

When a reader is given repeated opportunities to notice sound change — slowly, deliberately, without distraction — something fundamental shifts.

Sound becomes trackable.
Differences become audible.
Contrast becomes meaningful.

Once that happens, mapping sound to symbol becomes lighter. It becomes innate. The reader isn’t juggling as much. Decoding stops feeling like a performance and starts to feel like a process.

It takes practice, of course, but this is when fluency begins to emerge. Not because speed is emphasized, but because the system underneath no longer requires constant correction.

You can see this in children.
You can see it just as clearly in adults.

The relief, confidence and mental enrichment is often the same.

Why This Distinction Matters at Any Age

Many adult readers carry the belief that reading is simply “hard for them.” They may read well enough to get by, but never comfortably. Never without effort. Never without a sense of vigilance.

Why? Because the early tools of contextualizing and compensation - the tools which initially 'taught them to read' - simply stop being as effective.

Often, what’s missing isn’t knowledge of phonics itself.
It’s a stable relationship with the meaning-making nature inherent in the flexibility of sound.

The good news is that sound awareness is not age-bound. It can be strengthened whenever the conditions allow sound to lead again.

A Simpler Way to Hold the Difference

Once sound stabilizes in the mind, reading no longer depends on what’s happening on the page. The reader isn’t working letter by letter or guessing at meaning - grasping outward for clues to help them. They can hold sounds internally and move through words without constant visual effort.

When Phonemic Awareness has an unshakable foundation in the mind - comprehension strengthens quickly and powerfully.

The reader isn’t just getting the general idea of the text. They’re understanding what the words actually say — accurately and consistently — because sound is doing the work first. In time, the sound will, ironically, become sublingual (more on that in a future blog post).

For many learners, this foundation is indeed the singlemost important turning point in their reading journey. Reading stops feeling like decoding symbols and starts feeling like accessing language, meaning and reward. The words don’t need to be wrestled off the page; they’re already alive and dancing in the mind.

That shift — from managing print to understanding language — is what makes reading feel enriching instead of exhausting.

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Michael Land is an education designer focused on early literacy, phonemic awareness, and phonics-forward reading systems.