Phonological Awareness In English

In our phonics class we spend time on skills such as, decoding, or sounding out, words, phonemic awareness and spelling.
Phonological awareness is a broad category that includes the ability to hear and identify sounds, including rhymes, tongue twisters, syllables in words, and hearing ambient sounds in the neighborhood.
Phonemic awareness, a sub-step of phonological awareness, is the ability to hear individual sounds, or phonemes, in words. A word such as ‘cat’ has three individual phonemes, /c/ /a/ /t/ and it has three letters. A word such as ‘cheep’ has three phonemes, /ch/ /ee/ /p/ even though it has five letters. The English language has twenty-six letters and forty-four phonemes.
We teach students to isolate phonemes by identifying