What ability does phonemic awareness encompass?

Phonemic awareness refers specifically to the awareness of individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. This skill is crucial for developing reading and spelling abilities, as it allows learners to hear, identify, and manipulate these sounds. For example, students with strong phonemic awareness can segment sounds in a word, blend sounds together to form words, and substitute one sound for another to create new words.

Understanding phonemic awareness is foundational for successful literacy skills because it precedes phonics, where the relationship between sounds and their corresponding letters is taught. Essentially, effective reading involves breaking words down into their constituent sounds and being able to manipulate these sounds in various ways, which is precisely what phonemic awareness encompasses.