1. Phonological Awareness

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.

A kindergarten teacher could best determine if a child has begun to develop phonemic awareness by asking the child to:

• count the number of words the child hears in a sentence as the teacher says the sentence.

• say the word cat, then say the first sound the child hears in the word.

• point to the correct letter on an alphabet chart as the teacher names specific letters.

• listen to the teacher say boat and coat, then identify whether the two words rhyme.

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.

A teacher holds up a series of familiar objects, asking students to name each object and isolate the final sound they hear. This type of activity would be most appropriate for a student who:

• needs help developing phonemic segmentation skills.

• is performing below grade-level benchmarks in reading fluency.

• lacks automaticity in word recognition.

• has difficulty sounding out phonetically regular one-syllable words.

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

Asking students to listen to a word (e.g. same) and then tell the teacher all the sounds in the word is an exercise that would be most appropriate for students who:

• have a relatively low level of phonological awareness.

• are beginning to develop systematic phonics skills.

• have a relatively high level of phonemic awareness.

• are beginning to master the alphabetic principle.

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 beginning-level English Language Learner can consistently blend individual phonemes to make simple English words composed of two or three phonemes but is having difficulty blending the sounds of familiar single-syllable words composed of four phonemes (e.g., clip, trap, spin). Which of the following questions would be most important for the first-grade teacher to consider when addressing the needs of this student?

• Are the target words in the student's oral vocabulary in English?

• Does the student's primary language have consonant blends?

• Can the student distinguish between short and long vowel sounds in English?

• Do the target words have cognates in the student's primary language?