Beyond Blending and Segmenting: Advanced Phonemic Awarness

Which of the following students is demonstrating the specific type of phonological awareness known as phonemic awareness?

• A student who, after being shown a letter of the alphabet, can orally identify its corresponding sound(s).

• A student who listens to the words sing, ring, fling, and hang and can identify that hang is different.

• A student who, after hearing the word hat, can orally identify that it ends with the sound /t/

• A student who listens to the word magazine and can determine that it contains three syllables.

As students begin to read, the ability to blend phonemes orally contributes to their reading development primarily because it helps students:

• recognize and understand sight words in a text.

• use knowledge of letter-sound correspondence to decode words.

• guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from their context.

• divide written words into onsets and rimes.

Phonemic awareness contributes most to the development of phonics skills in beginning readers by helping them:

• recognize different ways in which one sound can be represented in print.

• count the number of syllables in a written word.

• identify in spoken language separate sounds that can be mapped to letters.

• understand the concept of a silent letter.

Which of the following first-grade students has attained the highest level of phonemic awareness?

• a student who, after hearing the word hot and the sound /ĭ/, can substitute /ĭ/for /ŏ/ to make the word hit

• a student who can orally segment the word wonderful into won-der-ful

• a student who after hearing the words fish and fun, can identify that they both begin with the same phoneme, /f/

• a student who can orally segment the word train into its onset and rime

A kindergarten teacher asks a small group of students to repeat after her. First, she says the word grape and then pronounces it as gr and ape. Next, she says the word take and then pronounces it as t and ake. This activity is likely to promote the students' phonemic awareness primarily by:

• helping them recognize distinct syllables in oral language.

• encouraging them to divide words into onsets and rimes.

• teaching them how to distinguish between consonants and vowels.

• promoting their awareness of letter-sound correspondence.

A teacher shows a student pictures of familiar objects. As the teacher points to the first picture, she asks the student to name the object in the picture. Next, she asks the student to count on his fingers the number of sounds he makes as he says the word again. This activity is most likely to promote which of the following?

• understanding of the alphabetic principle

• phonemic awareness skills

• development of letter-sound correspondence

• word identification skills

A fourth-grade student reads on grade level and consistently scores very high on spelling tests that are part of weekly word study activities. However, the student often misspells the same words, and other familiar words, in everyday writings. The following list shows examples of typical errors the students makes on class writing assignments and in informal notes to friends: (target words-girl, instead, decided, independent, interrupted; student spelling-gril, intead,decideded, indepednent, interruted).

The student's overall spelling performance suggests that the student most likely has a weakness in which of the following foundational skills?

• detecting syllable boundaries in words

• sounding out and blending letter-sounds to make words

• discriminating between a word's root morpheme and affixes

• segmenting and sequencing phonemes in words

Phonics is 

• study of the sound system
• An emphasis of sound to symbol relationship
• An individual unit of sound
• the context processor

Phonological Awareness is

• Individual unit of sound
• The ability to hear, identify, and manipulate specific sounds in words
• A sophisticated ability to notice, think about, and manipulate sounds in words
• the study of the sound system of languages

How many syllables in the word slivers?

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4