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
Some children who are taught by the whole-language method are not prevented from learning how sounds are represented by means of letters.