Which phoneme awareness skill is considered the most challenging for students to master?

Phoneme substitution is often regarded as the most challenging skill for students to master in phoneme awareness because it involves a higher level of cognitive processing compared to the other skills. Substitution requires a student to not only identify a phoneme within a word but also to mentally manipulate that phoneme—removing it and replacing it with another to form a new word. This necessitates an understanding of both the original word and the new word, along with the ability to separate and manipulate sounds in a flexible manner.

In contrast, blending, deletion, and segmentation involve more straightforward tasks. For instance, blending requires combining sounds to form a word, deletion involves removing a sound and recognizing the remainder, and segmentation focuses on breaking a word down into its individual sounds. These skills are foundational and may not demand the same level of manipulation as substitution, making substitution a more complex and difficult task for students to grasp fully.