Phonological awareness is the conscious sensitivity to the soun structure of language. It includes the ability to auditorily distinguish parts of speech, such as a word's syllables and a syllable's individual phonemes. Having a sound foundation -- the ability to segment and blend phonemes -- is critical for masterful fluency (pronunciation) and literacy (spelling/reading). Phonological awareness is an important and reliable predictor of later reading ability -- academic success -- and has, therefore, been the focus of much research. Phonological awareness is often confused with phonics, but it is different. Phonics requires students to match letters or letter patterns with sounds (decoding) and to use this information to "lift printed words off the page." Phonological awareness relates ONLY to speech sounds, not to alphabet letters or sound-spellings. Phonemic awareness is a subset of phonological awareness.