There's a HUGE shift in the speech pathology field to incorporate phonemic awareness tasks in everything we do, no matter what the primary diagnosis is. I don't know if we have changed how we teach kids, or if professionals are more aware of benchmarks that should be hit prior to school age so learning to read becomes more natural, but there's definitely a large deficit. I'd say about 15% of the kids that we see at our clinic have a primary diagnosis of language/lit problems (reading, comprehension, phonemic awareness difficulties) as a primary diagnosis. Never mind those kids who have language/lit as a secondary diagnosis. At any rate, it is a hot topic in the field at this point.