In its simplest terms, phonemic awareness means that a person understands how to use sounds to make words. Words are made up of individual sounds, and to be a proficient reader, the reader has to be able to recognize them and put them together. An example is rhyming words. The words "pie," "sky," and "sigh," rhyme but are not spelled alike. Being able to hear and identify the long "I" sound in each word and create a verbal list of rhyming words requires phonemic awareness.
Phonics puts sounds together with the letters of the alphabet. This helps students recognize that there are consistent relationships between letters and the sounds they make, which in turn make words. Mastery of phonics is essential to reading. It is the basis for learning new words, and reading more quickly, an essential tool in the next component, fluency.
Fluency is the ability to read quickly and accurately. It marries visual word recognition to understanding the meaning of the word and is vital to developing reading comprehension. Fluency takes time to achieve. A reader must read and practice over and over until word recognition becomes automatic. It requires a firm grasp of both phonemic awareness and phonics.
Vocabulary is all the words in a language. It can be the formal language spoken by a nation's population, or a language common to a particular ethnic or professional group. The study of vocabulary intensifies in fifth grade. In addition to learning each word's meaning, pronunciation, and correct spelling, they also learn to use prefixes and suffixes to change the use or meaning of words. For example, they the learn to add "ly" to make a noun an adverb or the prefix "un" to make an adjective negative. Fifth-grade vocabulary introduces more complex words, many of which students rarely hear in conversation.
Reading comprehension is the ability to understand what the writer is saying. Without satisfactory reading comprehension, it is difficult for a person to function. That is why someone whose reading comprehension is below the fifth-grade level is referred to as "functionally illiterate." Mastery of all the components of fifth-grade reading is the foundation for literacy, and vital to the success of an individual's further education.