What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness refers to the skill of recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken language. This ability is crucial for developing reading and spelling skills, as it serves as a foundational component of phonics instruction. Children with strong phonemic awareness can more easily connect sounds to letters, which enhances their decoding ability when they come to read.

This skill involves tasks such as being able to isolate sounds in a word, blend sounds to form words, or segment a word into its individual phonemes. For example, a child who can identify that the word "cat" consists of the sounds /k/, /æ/, and /t/ demonstrates phonemic awareness.

In contrast, the other options represent different literacy skills that are not focused specifically on the manipulation of sounds in spoken words. Reading fluently concerns the speed and accuracy of reading, writing coherent sentences relates to syntax and structure in written language, and memorizing sight words involves recognizing words by sight rather than decoding them phonetically. Thus, the focus of phonemic awareness is distinct and centered solely on the sounds within spoken language.