cues (like JRF); prealphabetic readers remembered wBc as the spelling of giraffe while partial alphabetic readers remembered JRF. Many other studies have replicated these findings (for example, Bowman & Treiman, 2002; de Abreu & Cardoso-Martins, 1998; Roberts, 2003; Scott & Ehri, 1990; Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999).
Although partial alphabetic readers have begun to use phonetic cues to identify words, they cannot yet accurately and reliably decode text. Ehri (2005) explains:
During the partial alphabetic phase children might remember how to read jail by connecting the first and final letters J and L to their letter names heard in the words “jay” and “el.” Because the middle letters are ignored, the connections formed are only partial; hence the name of the phase…. Reading during the partial alphabetic phase is an imperfect process that occurs among beginners who lack full knowledge of the alphabetic system and phonemic segmentation skill. (pp. 143, 145)
In spite of this imperfect decoding, the partial alphabetic phase is critical. Marilyn J. Adams and Maggie Bruck (1993) explain that readers who fail to transition to the partial alphabetic phase (and instead continue to read using context and visual cues) quickly become overwhelmed by the cognitive demands of remembering thousands of words:
Without the mnemonic support of the spelling-to-sound connections, the visual system must eventually become overwhelmed: the situation in which [these children] are left is roughly analogous to learning 50,000 telephone numbers to the point of perfect recall and instant recognition. (p. 130)
Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) articulate two additional problems with staying in the prealphabetic phase: (1) new words become increasingly harder to acquire, and (2) previously unseen words are unreadable.
New words become increasingly harder to acquire because it becomes more and more difficult to find distinctive visual cues for them. If a student recognizes the word stop because it “starts with a squiggle” (the s character), that student will likely confuse stop with other words that also “start with a squiggle” such as stove, son, sand, or sheep. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) explain that these readers “will make an ever-increasing number of errors and become confused and frustrated unless they discover or are led to discover an alternative strategy for establishing the relationship between the written and spoken forms of the language” (p. 408).
Second, previously unseen words are unreadable for prealphabetic readers because using visual and context cues is not generative; they can’t “figure out” a word. Upon encountering a word for the first time, someone must tell them the word, and they must memorize it in order to be able to recognize it again. Tunmer and Nicholson (2011) point out:
Beginning reading materials typically employ upwards of 1,500 words, each of which must be encountered a first time. Moreover, when a new word does appear in print it does not suddenly begin appearing with great frequency. Approximately 35%–40% of the words used in beginning reading materials appear only once (Jorm & Share, 1983). Thus beginning readers are continually encountering words that they have not seen before and may not set eyes on again for some time. (p. 409)
In sum, even though readers in the partial alphabetic phase do not decode accurately, transitioning from visual or context cues to phonetic cues is critical for later success.
Full Alphabetic Phase
The full alphabetic phase is also called the cipher stage (Gough, 1996) because students decipher the code of printed language and begin to accurately read words. During this phase, alphabet knowledge broadens into phonics knowledge—familiarity with the sounds associated with spelling patterns. Phonological awareness refines into phonemic awareness—the ability to detect and manipulate single sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. These progressions facilitate the development of phonological recoding ability.
Phonological recoding ability is the capacity to figure out unknown words by connecting sounds to print (Juel, 1991). The basic process follows these four steps.
1. A student encounters an unknown word in print.
2. The student generates possible pronunciations for the unknown word (using his or her knowledge of letter-sound and spelling-sound relationships).
3. The student searches his or her oral vocabulary for a word that is a close match to one of the possible pronunciations.
4. If the student finds a match, he or she checks to see if that word makes sense in context.
Although there are other ways to decode words (such as from memory, from context, or by creating analogies between unknown and known words), phonological recoding ability is uniquely important for two reasons. First, most obviously, it allows students to figure out words they have never seen before. Second, less obviously, but more importantly, it enables students to self-teach. The self-teaching hypothesis (Jorm, 1979; Jorm & Share, 1983; Share, 1995, 1999, 2004, 2008) suggests that once students can successfully sound out words, the best way for them to improve their reading is through independent reading. This is because, ultimately, skilled reading requires extensive and implicit knowledge of English orthography, which is impossible to teach directly.
Orthography refers to the representation of the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols. According to Roberts and colleagues (2011), “English has one of the most opaque or deep orthographies of all the world’s languages and is characterized by complex and variable relationships between spoken and written language” (p. 230). Orthographic knowledge includes familiarity with various spellings for various sounds, the ability to properly pronounce speech sounds, and an understanding of the proper formation of plurals and affixed words, permissible spelling patterns, and exceptions to rules. English orthography also includes:
Knowledge of correspondences between single letters or digraphs (e.g., sh, oa) and single phonemes, correspondences between groups of letters (e.g., tion) and groups of phonemes (e.g., /shun/), and polyphonic spelling patterns (e.g., ear as in bear and hear, own as in clown or flown) …[,] knowledge of more complex conditional rules whose application depends on position-specific constraints or the presence of “marker” letters … [,and] morphophonemic rules that speakers of English know implicitly, such as that regular noun plural inflection is realized as /s/ when it follows a voiceless stop consonant, as in cats, and as /z/ when it follows a voiced phoneme, as in dogs. (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011, p. 414)
Exercises 1 through 5 in appendix B (page 169) provide further insight into the complexities of English orthography.
In sum, English orthography entails a vast amount of detailed and highly variable information, most of which skilled readers access and apply quickly and without conscious attention. It is impossible for educators to directly teach such a volume of information to such a depth in the time available for reading instruction; “there are simply too many letter-sound relationships for children to acquire by direct instruction, probably several hundred” (Tunmer & Nicholson, 2011, p. 414). Therefore, students must learn the bulk of English orthography implicitly during independent reading (Adams, 1990; Adams & Bruck, 1993; Bowey & Muller, 2005; Cunningham, 2006; Cunningham, Perry, Stanovich, & Share, 2002; de Jong & Share, 2007; Ehri, 1992, 1997, 2005; Gough & Walsh, 1991; Harm & Seidenberg, 1999; Hulme, Snowling, & Quinlan, 1991; Kyte & Johnson, 2006; Perfetti, 1992; Share, 1995, 1999, 2004; Sprenger-Charolles, Siegel, & Bonnet, 1998; Tunmer & Chapman, 1998, 2006; Wessling & Reitsma, 2000). Cunningham and colleagues (2011) explain:
The detailed orthographic representations necessary for fast, efficient word recognition are primarily
