In a phonemic awareness lesson, which question would assist students in practicing phoneme segmentation?

The choice that supports phoneme segmentation is focused on auditory discrimination of individual sounds within a word, which is key to developing phonemic awareness. When students are asked how many sounds they hear in the word "crush," they are prompted to listen carefully and break the word down into its constituent phonemes: /k/, /r/, /ʌ/, /ʃ/, and /tʃ/. This practice helps students learn to identify and manipulate the individual sounds that make up words, ultimately improving their reading and spelling skills.

In contrast, questions that ask students to repeat the word back, count the letters, or identify the first sound do not specifically engage students in segmenting the word into its individual phonemes. These activities may enhance other skills such as memory, letter recognition, or initial sound identification, but they do not directly practice phoneme segmentation, which is the ability to deconstruct words into the smallest units of sound.