My daughter's teacher told me that she thinks my daughter has poor phonemic awareness. Does that mean she won't be a good reader
Not necessarily. Poor phonemic awareness is an indicator of reading difficulties. Phonemic awareness is the ability to distinguish one sound from another in a word. A reader with good phonemic awareness can think about the separate sounds in the word as well as the sounds blended together. Readers with poor phonemic awareness will have trouble sounding out words correctly and will sometimes have a hard time pronouncing difficult words. However, "phonemic awareness" has become a very trendy term in the reading world so people are starting to use it as a blanket term for reading troubles. Have your daughter assessed to determine her exact strengths and weakness with reading. Whether or not she has a weakness where phonemic awareness is concerned, if she has trouble reading, she should receive help. Treating the symptoms is sometimes much more important than figuring out the label of the problem.