phonemes in a word) (Liberman et al., 1974). Currently phonological awareness is the

widely accepted term and generally is used as an umbrella label for all levels of

conscious awareness of the sound elements in words. Simply, phonological awareness is

an ability to understand a word's sound structure, and it is critical for the efficient

decoding of printed words and the ability to form connections between sounds and letters

when spelling (Torgeson, 1997). In general, researchers indicate phonological awareness

includes five levels of language skills (e.g., Chard & Dickson, 1999). According to Chard

and Dickson (1999), these five levels of phonological awareness skills (rhyming,

phoneme identification, blending, segmentation, and manipulation) emerge following a

developmental hierarchy. The earliest developing phonological awareness skill was

rhyming and is the most challenging phonological awareness skill. It involves the ability

to manipulate phonemes (Chard & Dickson, 1999). More specifically, Adams (1990)

further described five levels of phonological awareness in terms of abilities to (a) hear

rhymes and alliteration as measured by knowledge of nursery rhymes, (b) do oddity tasks

(comparing and contrasting the sounds of words for rhyme and alliteration), (c) blend and

split syllables, (d) perform phonemic segmentation (such as counting out the number of

phonemes in a word), and (e) perform phoneme manipulation tasks (such as adding,

deleting a particular phoneme, and regenerating a word from the remainder). As

explained above, there are various dimensions of phonological awareness. A tapping task,

which was first used by Liberman (1973), is involved in developing children's

phonological awareness. Liberman had children use a wooden dowel to tap the number of

sounds they could hear in spoken sentences and then in words (Liberman, 1973). Over

the last 25 years, a huge amount of research has suggested that students who enter school