The chapter discusses evidence for why phonemic awareness is important in reading. Much of this evidence is correlational: children with good phonemic awareness seem to end up being good readers. Why would phonemic awareness lead to good reading skills? More speculatively, one problem with interpreting correlations is that they don't establish causality; they only indicate that two variables seem to be related. Do you think that phonemic awareness leads directly to (i.e., causes) good reading skills, or might both be the result of some other underlying factor?