A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound of an alphabetic language. For example, may has two phonemes, /m/ /ay/; sit has three phonemes, /s/ /i/ /t/, tax has four phonemes, /t/ /a/ /k/ /s/. Phonemic awareness (PA) is the ability to distinguish our speech sounds.

Within PA is also the underlying understanding that these sounds are represented by letters, but PA does not include explicitly linking a letter to its sound; it has only to do with manipulating sounds.

When sounds are paired with the letters (graphemes) that represent them, PA is called PHONICS. For example, "Tell me the letter that stands for the sound, /p/, or, "What is the first letter you hear in the word, pilot?"

The ARCS administered the Test of Auditory Analysis Skills (TAAS) to assess PA. As a syllable and phoneme deletion task, it assesses one among four kinds of phoneme manipulation abilities listed by the National Reading Panel (NRP). The tasks can be used to assess and as types of phoneme manipulation to practice to improve learners' PA abilities.

In the following list of assessment tasks quoted from the NRP report, letters between slashes should be read as sounds, not letters. For example, /b/ is read as the first sound in "bob" as opposed to b without the slashes, which would normally be read as [the name of the letter], "bee."

Phonemic Awareness Assessment tasks from the NRP:

• Phoneme isolation, which requires recognizing individual sounds in words; for example, "Tell me the first sound in paste." (/p/)
  
  
• Phoneme identity, which requires recognizing the common sound in different words; for example, "Tell me the sound that is the same in bike, boy, and bell." (/b/)
  
  
• Phoneme categorization, which requires recognizing the word with the odd sound in a sequence of three or four words; for example, "Which word does not belong? bus, bun, rug." (rug)
  
  
• Phoneme blending, which requires listening to a sequence of separately spoken sounds and combining them to form a recognizable word; for example, "What word is /s/ /k/ /u/ /l/?" (school)
  
  
• Phoneme segmentation, which requires breaking a word into its sounds by tapping out or counting the sounds or by pronouncing and positioning a marker for each sound; for example, "How many phonemes are there in ship?" (three: /š/ /I/ /p/)
  
  
• Phoneme deletion, which requires recognizing what word remains when a specified phoneme is removed; for example, "What is smile without the /s/?" (mile)

Research has found that, "Adult non-readers are unable to consistently perform, on their own, almost all phonemic awareness tasks....very few adult non-readers readers possess even the most basic phonemic awareness ability." Therefore, ABE learners' PA abilities should be assessed with the above tasks to determine their initial PA abilities.

As with normally developing children, PA of non-reading disabled adults improves as reading ability improves, continuing to develop until decoding skills are established. However, adult poor readers who report having had difficulty learning to read as children show persisting poor phonemic awareness. Assessment of phonemic awareness of adult readers who are not progressing is always indicated. They should receive continued instruction in phonemics; some instruction can be as isolated practice of a single PA assessment task, but as sounds become attached to letters, phonemic awareness is best taught as part of word analysis (phonics) instruction.