McLachlan & Arrow (2016) agree that both phonemic awareness and alphabetic principle are vital in the development of children in their path to become competent readers (as cited in Reutzel & Cooter, p. 115).
Another way to test the skill is through the use of expressive rhyme (Wren, S., Litke, B., Jinkins, D., Paynter, S., Watts, J. & Alanis, I., 2013). I asked him to rhyme words and then to choose words that rhyme out of a set. He struggled to do come up with more than one rhyme even when I gave him examples on how to make the rhymes. “The child's ability to rhyme reflects an appreciation of the sounds within words, and an implicit understanding that words are made up of sounds” (Wren, et al. 2013). Based on this informal assessment, I can assume that he has not mastered his phonemic