Phonological & Phonemic Awareness Flashcards

A teacher says, '/s/ /a/ /t/ — what word?' This activity is an example of which phonemic awareness skill?

Answer: Phoneme blending

The teacher provides individual phonemes and asks students to combine (blend) them into a whole word, which is the definition of phoneme blending.

Which assessment task would best measure a first-grader's phoneme segmentation ability?

Answer: Asking the student to say each individual sound in 'ship'

Phoneme segmentation requires students to orally break a spoken word into its individual phonemes (/ʃ/ /ɪ/ /p/), which is precisely what the second task asks.

Onset-rime awareness involves recognizing which parts of a syllable?

Answer: The initial consonant or consonant cluster and the remaining vowel-consonant unit

The onset is the initial consonant(s) before the vowel (e.g., /bl/ in 'block') and the rime is the vowel and any following consonants (e.g., /ock/), making onset-rime a level between syllable and full phoneme awareness.

A teacher asks: 'Say the word smile. Now say it without the /s/.' This is an example of which task?

Answer: Phoneme deletion

Phoneme deletion requires the student to remove a specific phoneme from a word and say what remains, which is exactly what this task asks.

Research by Ehri et al. indicates that phonemic awareness instruction is most effective when it:

Answer: Is connected to letters (graphemes) rather than taught purely in oral/auditory form

Ehri and colleagues found that phonemic awareness instruction linked to letters (i.e., connecting sounds to their written symbols) produces stronger reading outcomes than purely oral instruction.

Which of the following words contains exactly four phonemes?

Answer: Frog

'Frog' contains exactly four phonemes: /f/ /r/ /ɒ/ /g/; 'Ship' has three (/ʃ/ɪ/p/), 'Chat' has three (/tʃ/æ/t/), and 'Blend' has five (/b/l/ɛ/n/d/).

Why is phonemic awareness considered a strong predictor of future reading success?

Answer: Because it underpins the ability to map sounds to letters, which is essential for decoding

Phonemic awareness is predictive of reading success because understanding that words consist of individual sounds is the foundation needed to learn how those sounds map onto letters (the alphabetic principle) for decoding and encoding.