What strategy is being used when a teacher asks, "What word am I trying to say, /p/ /i/ /n/?"

The strategy in this scenario is phoneme blending. This technique involves combining individual sounds, or phonemes, to form a complete word. When the teacher articulates the sounds /p/, /i/, and /n/ in isolation, they are prompting the students to listen and merge these phonemes into a recognizable word, which in this case is "pin." By engaging in phoneme blending, students practice their ability to connect sounds to form words, a critical skill in the development of reading and phonemic awareness.

Phoneme deletion involves removing a sound from a word to create a new word, while phoneme segmentation refers to breaking a word down into its individual sounds. Phoneme substitution consists of changing one phoneme in a word to create a new word. None of these processes apply to the scenario presented, as the focus here is specifically on joining sounds together rather than manipulating them.