The sound /ŋ/ is written with the digraph ng in English. In the word that ends with ng, the two letters work together to produce the velar nasal sound /ŋ/—as in sing. The other options don’t use that digraph to represent /ŋ/: phone has ph for /f/, blue uses ue for /uʊ/, and go has g and o for /g/ and /oʊ/. So the word that contains the /ŋ/ digraph is the one with ng at the end.

In phonics instruction, students progress from decoding simple pieces to analyzing larger word structures. You start with basic vowel sounds and letter sounds, then move to blending sounds together to form words. After that, learners practice grouping sounds into onsets and rimes, and they learn to read consonant blends as units. Syllable types, however, require applying all of these skills across more than one syllable and recognizing how different patterns change pronunciation within longer words. This step involves identifying open and closed syllables, vowel-consonant-e patterns, r-controlled syllables, and other patterns, then using that knowledge to divide and read multisyllabic words. Because it depends on having a solid grasp of sounds, blends, and how rimes combine within a word, syllable types naturally come last in the sequence.

Decoding is when you translate letters into sounds to read a word you haven’t seen before. By using letter-sound relationships, you map graphemes to phonemes and blend them to pronounce the word. This is different from memorization, where a reader recognizes a word from memory without sounding it out, and from vocabulary or semantic knowledge, which are about the word’s meaning rather than how to pronounce it. So using letter-sound relationships to figure out an unfamiliar word is decoding.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to identify individual sounds in spoken words. These sounds, called phonemes, are the smallest units of sound that distinguish words. Being able to hear, isolate, and manipulate each sound in a word—like recognizing that the word “cat” has three phonemes: /k/, /æ/, /t/—is what this skill is all about. That focus on the separate sounds in speech is why this description is the best fit. Other options point to different ideas. Recognizing rhymes and syllables involves larger sound units and is part of broader phonological awareness, not the specific task of isolating individual phonemes. Recognizing printed words by sight relates to orthographic knowledge and whole-word recognition, not the sound structure of speech. Understanding the meaning of words is about semantics, not sound. Phonemic awareness specifically targets the sound level in spoken language and is a key foundation for decoding and spelling.