These phonemic awareness test below are interesting. 
We now know that "phonemic awareness" is a key trait
of successful readers - Stanovich.  But Dave below
says that there is no "written component" for this. 
In all practicality I would agree until now.

If one desires a "written component" for phonemic
awareness it can be done using truespel.  The free
converter at truespel.com converts traditional
spelling (tradspel) to truespel phonetics.  There are
consistently 40 spellings for 40 phonemes.  Truespel
uses a phonetic spelling designed to be as close to
tradspel (USA accent only at present) as possible
without being conflicting.  (This takes a little
compromising with tradspel because some letters take
many sounds.)  It uses only keyboard letters, so it's
keyboard friendly.

Kids can write phonetically as they learn to read.  
The truespel converter printout has tradspel next to
truespel for phonetic compairison.  Transition to
tradspel has been shown not to be a problem for
phonetics first systems (e.g., IBM's Writing to Read).
 Truespel now has dictionaries for looking up how to
spell words by what they sound like, - phonetically in
truespel.

tom z   creator of truespel


--- Dana Newingham <danakayn at yahoo.com> wrote:


> The current thinking about the cause of reading

> disabilities is going back to early childhood and

> phonemic awareness and manipulation.  I think many

> of us instinctively suspected this anyway.  There

> are many programs for older students and adults that

> go back to this and are showing several years of

> progress in a few months.

>    

>   These were the 10 componenents of phonemic

> manipulation skills that children need to be able to

> do in playing with sounds before reading and phonics

> instruction.  (Wouldn't it be great to educate

> parents about this also?)

>   rhyming, hearing imitial sounds that are the same,

> beign able to isolate what the initial sound is,

> categorizing onset and rime, isolating the end and

> middle sound, blending sounds to mame words,

> segmenting words into parts--sounds or syllables

> (with clapping for number of parts, for instance),

> adding sounds to words (phoneme addition), phoneme

> deletion, and phoneme substitution.

>    

>   The other critical suggestion iss that letter

> sounds rather than letter names were used during

> these exercises because there is not written

> component to this--just development of important

> auditiory skills. 

>    

>   Dana Newingham

> 

>  

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Convert text to phonetic spelling at truespel.com (USA accent). 
See Authorhouse.com for truespel books, including dictionaries and analyses of how the alphabet spells the sounds of USA English.