2.1 Sounds and Letters (SESAT 1-2): Phonemic Awareness & Letter-Sound Basics

Sounds and Letters on Stanford 10

Sounds and Letters is the first reading subtest a child meets on Stanford 10. It appears only at the two kindergarten-age levels:

Pearson states that at the SESAT levels Stanford 10 "measures how well the student is learning the basic skills important for reading," and that the Sounds and Letters subtest "has an increased emphasis on phonemic awareness and phonics and closely reflects reading research findings." In Pearson's SESAT 2 sample pages, the teacher reads aloud the text that appears in shaded boxes, and children mark answers in their booklets. There is no Abbreviated Battery at the SESAT levels, so a kindergartner taking Stanford 10 takes the full subtest.

Phonological Awareness: From Big Units to Single Sounds

Phonological awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of spoken language, without looking at print. Children usually develop it from larger to smaller units:

1. Words in a sentence: hearing that "I see a dog" has four words.
2. Rhyme: hearing that cake and lake end with the same sounds, while cake and kick do not.
3. Syllables: clapping ba-na-na as three parts.
4. Onset and rime: splitting map into /m/ + -ap.
5. Individual phonemes: isolating, blending and segmenting single sounds.

Sounds and Letters items concentrate on the later steps, because those predict later reading success most strongly.

Phoneme Skills Young Students Practice

Phonemic awareness means hearing and working with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. The skills below are the core of early phonemic-awareness instruction:

• Phoneme Isolation: Recognizing individual sounds in words (e.g., identifying that "sock" begins with the sound /s/ or that "cup" ends with the sound /p/).
• Medial Vowel Discrimination: Identifying words that share the same internal vowel sound (e.g., recognizing that "man" and "cat" share the short /æ/ sound, whereas "bed" does not).
• Phoneme Blending: Synthesizing isolated spoken phonemes into a unified word (e.g., combining /s/ /t/ /r/ /æ/ /p/ to produce "strap").
• Phoneme Segmentation & Substitution: Identifying the new word created when a phoneme is removed or replaced (e.g., replacing the initial /k/ in "cat" with /b/ to produce "bat").

Letter Knowledge and Letter-Sound Correspondence

The "letters" half of the subtest connects sounds to print. Kindergarten instruction usually covers:

• Letter recognition: naming uppercase and lowercase letters and telling similar shapes apart (b/d, p/q, m/n).
• Consonant sounds: knowing the most common sound for each consonant, including that c and g have two sounds.
• Short vowel sounds: /a/ as in apple, /e/ as in egg, /i/ as in itch, /o/ as in octopus and /u/ as in up.
• Beginning and ending letters: choosing the letter that spells the first or last sound of a pictured word, such as t for the end of cat.
• Early digraphs: recognizing that sh, ch and th each spell one sound.

Helping Young Children Prepare

Kindergartners do best when the test feels familiar rather than intimidating:

• Play sound games daily. "I spy something that begins with /b/," clapping syllables in names, and making silly rhymes build exactly these skills.
• Use sound boxes. Draw three boxes, say a word such as sun, and push one counter into a box for each sound.
• Practice listening to the whole direction. Directions are read aloud once in order, so practice waiting until the adult finishes before marking an answer.
• Practice marking one answer neatly in a picture row, and moving to the next row.
• Keep it short. Ten-minute sessions are more effective at this age than long drills.

Why These Skills Matter Beyond Kindergarten

Sounds and Letters is the foundation for several later subtests. The same sound-to-letter knowledge returns in Word Study Skills (Primary 1-Intermediate 1), whose Phonetic Analysis clusters test consonant and vowel patterns, and in Spelling (Primary 1-TASK 3), whose largest cluster is Phonetic Principles. A child who can hear every sound in stamp (/s/ /t/ /a/ /m/ /p/) is far less likely to write stap later. Weak phonemic awareness in kindergarten is therefore worth addressing early, through short daily sound play rather than worksheets.