Psychologist: Phonemic awareness, or the knowledge that spoken language can be broken into component sounds, is essential for learning to read an alphabetic language  But one also needs to learn how sounds are symbolically represented by means of letters; otherwise, phonemic awareness will not translate into the ability to read an alphabetic language
Yet many children who are taught by the whole-language method, which emphasizes the ways words sound, learn to read alphabetic languages
When the whole-language method succeeds in teaching someone how to represent sounds by means of letters, that person acquires the ability to read an alphabetic language.