Phenomes vs phonems? Linguistic help!

Factual Questions
1

I’m facilitating an adult course that helps teachers use neurodevelopmental constructs to understand and mitigate student difficulties in learning. I taught science in an elementary school in my last job and so I don’t know much about language and reading instruction.

One of the sections in the course deals with the levels of language that students must negotiate in order to be successful readers and writers. I thought I had a good grasp on it…phonological understanding, morphological awareness, syntactical awareness and so on.
Then a reading teacher taking the course started talking about phenomes as the basis of language and I was stumped. I understand what a phenome is in genetics (more or less) but I’m unsure of what it is in language or how a phenome is different that a phoneme. Could someone use simple, easy to digest words, to paint a picture for me?

2

I have an undergraduate and graduate education in Linguistics and have never heard the term “phenome” applied to language.

Wikipedia only gives information as it applies to genetics , and a google search yielded this blog post (terribly good cite, I know) that seems to indicate it’s a problem with transposition of vowels.

If you’re looking for something more basic than a phoneme that would be a phone; I have no idea what this person is talking about.

3

The most likely thing is that the reading teacher has confused “phonemes” and “phenomes.” Ask this person to give you a reference that mentions “phenomes.”

4

Could there be some mixup with morphemes and phonemes?