Foundational Reading Skills: Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Fluency
Know the continuum, not just the labels
Phonological awareness is the umbrella term: the ability to notice and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language - words in a sentence, syllables, onsets and rimes, and individual phonemes. Phonemic awareness sits at the top of that continuum and is strictly oral: blending, segmenting, deleting, and substituting individual phonemes. Phonics is different in kind because print is involved - teaching the alphabetic principle that letters and letter combinations map to sounds.
Candidates should be able to define grapheme (a letter or letter team representing one phoneme), digraph (two letters, one sound, as in sh, th, ch, ck), consonant blend or cluster (two or three adjacent letters whose sounds are each heard, as in bl, str), diphthong (a gliding vowel, as in boy or cow), r-controlled vowel, and schwa (the unstressed uh in the second syllable of wagon). Know the six common syllable types - closed, open, vowel-consonant-e, vowel team, r-controlled, consonant-le - and structural analysis for multisyllabic words.
Fluency has three parts: accuracy, automaticity (rate), and prosody (expression and phrasing). A fast reader with no phrasing is not fluent, and a words-correct-per-minute score alone does not measure comprehension.
Traps
Items love to swap phonological and phonemic awareness, or to describe a print task as phonemic awareness. Others hide blends among digraphs, or imply that fluency equals speed.
Rule of thumb
Ask: is there print involved? If yes, it is phonics, not phonemic awareness.
Worked example
How many phonemes are in ship? Three - /sh/ /i/ /p/. The sh is a digraph, so four letters carry three sounds.