What does phonemic awareness involve?

Phonemic awareness involves the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. This skill is crucial for early reading development as it forms the foundation for understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. When students develop phonemic awareness, they learn how to segment words into their individual sounds, blend sounds to form words, and manipulate sounds to create new words. This skill helps them decode words when they begin to read, as they can apply their understanding of phonemes to the written language.

Understanding and manipulating sounds is distinct from other skills mentioned in the choices, such as reading text aloud, defining vocabulary words, or summarizing texts, which do not specifically focus on the auditory processing of phonemes. This makes the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds the key characteristic of phonemic awareness.