How should phonemic awareness be assessed?
Since researchers first began to study phonological awareness in the early 1970s, more than twenty different tasks have been used to measure awareness of phonemes in words. These measures can be grouped into three broad categories: sound comparison, phoneme segmentation, and phoneme blending. • Sound comparison tasks use a number of different formats that all require children to make comparisons between the sounds in different words. For example, a child might be asked to indicate which word (of several) begins or ends with the same sound as a target word (i.e., “Which word begins with the same first sound as cat: boy, cake, or fan?”). Additionally, tasks that require children to generate words that have the same first or last sound as a target word would fall in this category. Sound comparison tasks are among the least difficult measures of phonemic awareness, and thus are particularly appropriate for kindergarten age children. • Phoneme segmentation tasks involve counting, pronouncin
