Phonemic awareness skills: What are they?
Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness in which listeners are able to hear, identify and manipulate phonemes. Phonemic awareness and phonological awareness are often confused since they are interdependent. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate individual phonemes. Phonological awareness includes this ability, but it also includes the ability to hear and manipulate larger units of sound. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound that can differentiate meaning. The phoneme is the basic building block for spoken words. In English, there are an infinite number of possible words, but there are only 45 phonemes. For example, separating the spoken word cat into three distinct phonemes requires phonemic awareness skill: /c/, /a/, and /t/. To make new words we just delete or rearrange the phonemes. The spoken word mat becomes man when the phoneme t is replaced with the phoneme n. This, again, is awareness to the fact that a few phonemes are rearranged to make
