Oregon Educator Licensure Assessments (ORELA) Practice Exam

What skill is crucial for a child to understand the sounds within spoken words?

1. Phonemic awareness

2. Rime identification

3. Letter recognition

4. Text comprehension

The correct answer is: Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness is a foundational skill in literacy development that involves the ability to recognize and manipulate the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. This skill is crucial because it enables children to break down words into their constituent sounds, which is essential for tasks such as decoding words during reading and spelling them when writing. Phonemic awareness facilitates understanding how words are formed and allows children to play with sounds through activities like rhyming and blending. While rime identification, letter recognition, and text comprehension are all important components of reading and literacy, they do not specifically focus on the sounds within words as directly as phonemic awareness does. Rime identification relates to recognizing word patterns and endings, letter recognition involves identifying written characters, and text comprehension pertains to understanding the meaning of written text. Phonemic awareness serves as the building block that supports these other skills, making it the most critical for understanding the sounds within spoken words.