"Phonological Awareness: The ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of language. This is an all encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level." 

- University of Oregon Big Ideas in Beginning Reading

Although the terms are often used interchangeably, phonological awareness and phonemic awareness refer to different sets of skills. Phonological awareness refers to the identification and manipulation of units of oral language, including words, syllables, onsets and rimes, and phonemes. Phonemic Awareness refers specifically to the manipulation of individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words.

The basic skills for phonological and phonemic awareness develop along a continuum from easy to difficult:

1. Word comparison

2. Rhyming

3. Sentence segmentation

4. Syllable segmentation and blending

5. Onset-rime blending and segmentation

6. Blending and segmenting individual phonemes

7. Phoneme deletion and manipulation

In school, phonological awareness skills are typically taught in kindergarten and first grade. 

Phonological awareness in general, and phonemic awareness specifically, is crucial to learning to read. In the English language, written letters represent sounds or phonemes. Understanding that "cat" and "carrot" start with the same sound makes connecting sounds with their written symbols easier. For example, being able to verbally blend sounds indicates that a student will likely have less difficulty blending sounds in unknown words when reading. Without phonemic awareness, phonics makes little sense.

There are multiple ways to assess a student's phonological awareness. Informal inventories such as the Phonological Awareness Skills Test can help teachers understand what skills a student has learned and what skills they have yet to learn. However, in order to be considered proficient on phonemic awareness tasks, a student should be able to complete the tasks without much effort. Phoneme Segmentation Fluency is a good, quick measure of general phonological awareness proficiency.