A teacher asks a student to break down the word "dog" into its individual sounds /d/, /o/, and /g/. What is this task called?

The task of breaking down the word "dog" into its individual sounds /d/, /o/, and /g/ is called segmenting. This process involves identifying and isolating the individual phonemes in a word, which is a critical skill in phonemic awareness and early literacy development. By segmenting, students learn to listen to the distinct sounds in words, which aids them in decoding and spelling.

Blending, on the other hand, involves combining individual sounds to form a word, while rhyming focuses on identifying words that have the same ending sound. Substituting refers to replacing one phoneme in a word with another to create a new word. These skills all play important roles in literacy, but the specific action of breaking down sounds is defined as segmenting.