What does phonological awareness enable children to do?

Phonological awareness is a critical skill that helps children recognize and manipulate the sounds in spoken language. By developing phonological awareness, children learn to identify individual sounds (phonemes), syllables, and rhymes within words. This foundational skill is essential for effective reading and writing, as it allows children to break down words into their component sounds, which is necessary for decoding words when they begin to read.

Being able to discriminate sounds in spoken words means that children can hear the differences between different sounds, which is vital for understanding how sounds correspond to letters and words in written language. This ability lays the groundwork for later literacy skills, including phonics, spelling, and vocabulary development.

In contrast, identifying letters in the alphabet and writing sentences correctly are important literacy skills, but they rely on the foundational knowledge that phonological awareness provides. Reading words fluently requires not only phonological skills but also vocabulary and comprehension. Therefore, the core function of phonological awareness primarily focuses on sound discrimination, making the chosen answer the most directly related to that skill.