Phonological awareness is necessary but not sufficient for reading acquisition. Phonological awareness is teachable and promoted by attentions to instructional variables. A phoneme is a speech sound. It is the smallest unit of language and has no inherent meaning. The ability to hear and manipulate the sounds in spoken words, and the understanding that spoken words and syllables are made up of sequences of speech sounds.
Phonemic awareness deals with hearing language at the phoneme level.
The ability to hear and manipulate the sound structure of language. This is an encompassing term that involves working with the sounds of language at the word, syllable, and phoneme level.