*Phonological awareness* is the ability to segment language aurally.

The most well known example of this would be onset-rime segmentation. The ability to show awareness of rime has been shown in the research to be a key skill requirement for successful reading.

Another example is when I was working in a class where the children were asked to begin a story "Once upon a time" and only a few of them were successfully able to do this. Their attempts showed that most of them were not segmenting these four words correctly at the phonological level.

There were all sorts of variations:

• One supona time

• Once up onatime, etc

I also recently watched a video of a teacher helping children to learn to write sentences by getting them (among other things) to 'hear' the sentence and segment her language aurally.

*Phonemic awareness* is the ability to discriminate the individual phonemes within words - the sounds which make up that word.

Both phonological and phonemic awareness are aural skills. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness.

*Phonic awareness* is the ability to represent the sounds of phonemes with appropriate letters or letter combinations.

Bob Baynham