ALTA National Registration Practice Exam

The focus of the correct answer highlights the importance of recognizing and manipulating the individual sounds or phonemes in spoken words. Phonemic awareness is a critical component of phonological awareness that specifically entails the understanding that words are made up of discrete sounds. This skill is foundational for reading and writing, as it enables learners to connect sounds to letters, facilitating the decoding of words.

Phonemic awareness is closely tied to oral language skills and does not involve the written form of language; it is purely auditory. By developing phonemic awareness, learners can better segment and blend sounds, which is essential for mastering early literacy skills.

While syllabication, fluency, and decoding are also related to literacy, they do not specifically emphasize the sound structure of language in the same way that phonemic awareness does. Syllabication focuses on breaking words into syllables rather than individual phonemes. Fluency relates to the ability to read text accurately and quickly with proper expression, and decoding is the process of translating written symbols into sounds, which relies on phonemic awareness but encompasses a broader range of skills.