The assessment would be an appropriate way to test the students' ability to perform which phonemic awareness task?

The choice indicating the assessment is appropriate for testing the students' ability to recognize how many phonemes are contained in a word is accurate because phonemic awareness specifically relates to the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds—called phonemes—in spoken words. Recognizing phonemes is a foundational skill for developing reading proficiency, as it allows students to decode words effectively.

Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language, and the task of counting them requires students to listen closely and distinguish between different sounds within a word. This task helps in assessing their understanding of the sound structure of language, which is crucial for both reading and spelling.

In contrast, identifying word rhymes, segmenting words into syllables, and counting the number of letters in a word focus on different aspects of language skills. Rhyme identification relates more to the sound patterns of words rather than individual phonemes, while syllable segmentation is about recognizing larger sound units. Counting letters pertains to the orthographic representation of words, which is not a phonemic task. Therefore, the assessment’s design to test recognition of phonemes aligns perfectly with the objectives of phonemic awareness.