Which task helps improve a student's ability to manipulate sounds within words?

The task that effectively improves a student's ability to manipulate sounds within words is phoneme deletion. This activity involves recognizing a specific phoneme in a word and then removing it to create a new word. For example, in the word "sand," if a student is asked to say the word without the initial /s/ sound, they would identify the result as "and." This process requires not only sound recognition but also the ability to mentally manipulate those sounds, which is critical for developing phonemic awareness.

By practicing phoneme deletion, students gain a deeper understanding of the individual sounds that make up words and how those sounds can be altered to form new words. This manipulation strengthens their overall phonological skills, which are important for reading and spelling.

While phoneme blending, segmentation, and recognition are all important tasks in phonemic awareness, they focus on different aspects: blending involves combining sounds to form words, segmentation breaks words into their individual sounds, and recognition is about identifying and naming sounds. In contrast, deletion specifically emphasizes the manipulation of sounds, making it particularly relevant for sharpening skills in sound manipulation.