Phonological awareness refers to the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken words. Our awareness of these sounds begins from infancy as young children learn to talk before ever seeing a printed word. These sounds can be categorized as syllables, onsets and rimes, or phonemes. Students must have an understanding of these sounds in order to recognize how they are applied to written words (Moats, 2010).
Individual phonemes comprise onsets and rimes. For example, an onset is the initial consonant syllabus that appears such as the “c” in “cat.” Rimes are the vowels and consonants that follow the onset such as the “a” and “t” in “cat.” Similarly, phonemic awareness is the ability to detect isolate, manipulate sections of words including the smallest unit of sound in spoken words (Dilgard et al., 2022).