How does phonemic awareness support decoding and encoding?

• A. It focuses only on word memorization and has little impact on decoding.
• B. It helps students map sounds to letters (phoneme-grapheme correspondences) during decoding and encoding.
• C. It is the same as vocabulary development.
• D. It involves recognizing whole words by sight.

Answer: (B)

Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words. This skill directly supports decoding and encoding by providing the ability to map those sounds to letters. When decoding, students hear the sounds in a word and connect each sound to the corresponding letter or letter combination, then blend the sounds to pronounce the word—for example, hearing /k/ /æ/ /t/ and realizing it maps to c-a-t to read “cat.” When encoding, they hear the sounds in a word and select the correct letters to represent each sound, spelling the word accurately like cat, map, or sun. Vocabulary development focuses on word meanings, and sight-word recognition relies on recognizing whole words without decoding, so they don’t capture the essential sound-to-letter mapping that phonemic awareness provides.