What does phonemic awareness involve?

Phonemic awareness is specifically the skill that involves recognizing and manipulating individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. This foundational skill is crucial for effective reading instruction because it enables students to break down words into their constituent sounds, facilitating the process of sounding out words when they read. A strong phonemic awareness allows learners to understand how sounds combine to form words and how altering those sounds can create new words, which is fundamental in developing reading and spelling skills.

The other options, while related to literacy, address different skills. Writing in complete sentences pertains to writing proficiency, decoding relates to the ability to translate written text into spoken language, and inferring meaning from context involves comprehension skills that come into play after decoding words. None of those directly pertain to the recognition and manipulation of sounds, which is the essence of phonemic awareness.