Phonemic Awareness in Learning to Read and Write

Question 1

Boxes drawn on a piece of paper, so that children can place a token in an individual box for each sound they hear in a word. This helps to build and assess phonemic awareness

Answer 1

Elkonin boxes

Question 2

a visual representation for a single sound, usually a letter or group of letters. For example, “t” says one sound, /t/; “gh” says one sound, /f/.

Answer 2

grapheme

Question 3

the smallest unit of sound that has meaning. For example, the word ‘rebook’ contains two morphemes: the prefix re- and the root book.

Answer 3

morpheme

Question 4

a single unit of sound

Answer 4

phoneme

Question 5

letter sounds as well as syllables, rhymes, onsets, and rimes

Answer 5

phonological awareness

Question 6

the part of a word that contains one vowel sound. For example, in the word ‘eating’ there are two syllables, even though there are three vowels.

Answer 6

syllable

Question 7

phonics is the same as or included in phonemic awareness

Answer 7

false

Question 8

the ability to identify, isolate, and manipulate sounds in a language

Answer 8

phonemic awareness

Question 9

levels of phonemic awareness

Answer 9

phoneme isolation
phoneme identity
phoneme categorization
phoneme blending
phoneme segmentation
phoneme deletion
phoneme substitution

Question 10

phoneme isolation

Answer 10

recognizing an individual sound in a word

Question 11

phoneme identity

Answer 11

identifying a spoken sound in different words

Question 12

phoneme categorization

Answer 12

identifying an odd sound (a child knowing that the /f/ in fun is different than /b/ in bug)

Question 13

phoneme blending

Answer 13

being able to hear individual sounds and blend them together to make a word (blending the sounds /h/, /i/, and /t/ together to put together hit)

Question 14

phoneme segmentation

Answer 14

being able to hear a word and distinguish the individual sounds within the word ( a child is told the word ‘bug’ and can say /b/, /u/, and /g/ and can also state that there are three sounds)

Question 15

phoneme deletion

Answer 15

recognizing a smaller word within a word when a sound is taken away (when told the word ‘stall’ and asked what word is left when the /s/ is taken away, the child would say ‘tall”)

Question 16

phoneme substitution

Answer 16

substituting one phoneme for another (a child is told the word ‘cat’ and asked to change the /a/ to a /u/ and the child says ‘cut’)

Question 17

A teacher is showing a student a chart of pictures that all begin with the /b/ sound. She has the student name what the picture is, such as a bag, and then say what the letter the picture begins with.
Is this considered a phonemic awareness activity?

Answer 17

No. Because the teacher asks for a letter name, the activity is phonics; it involves letter-sound correspondence.

Question 18

A student is listening to the teacher as she says the word ‘dog’. The student is to tell the teacher what sound he hears in the middle of the word.
Is this considered a phonemic awareness activity?

Answer 18

Yes. This is sound isolation.

Question 19

A teacher stretches out the sounds /n/, /o/, and /t/, and students have to identify what word is being said.
Is this considered a phonemic awareness activity?

Answer 19

Yes. This is sound blending.