Phonological Awareness

Phonological awareness is a mental construct or how a person thinks about the sound structures of language. Phonological awareness allows one to attend to, discriminate, remember, and manipulate sounds at the sentence, word, syllable, and INDIVIDUAL phoneme (sound) level. 

Phonemic awareness  falls under the umbrella of phonological awareness but pertains only to individual phonemes (sounds) in a word.  

Phonemic awareness is an essential skill that underlies a child's ability to learn to read and spell as it requires the student to know words are comprised of individual sounds that can be manipulated. 

A students mastery of phonemic awareness especially,  their ability to match, blend, segment, and rearrange sounds in real OR nonsense words directly correlates to his/her ability to connect the sounds of our language to letters or letter combinations while decoding (reading) or encoding (writing) text.