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Note
1 1 I say “largely” because there are inconsistencies in the relationship between spelling and sound (e.g., phone, tone, cone vs. done), and there are regularities in the relationship between spelling and meaning (e.g., snore, snarl, sneeze, snort all relate to the nose).
PART II Learning to Read and Spell
Most children are already competent users of their native language by the time they go to school, and reading develops from this foundation. Indeed, as Mattingly (1972) proposed more than 30 years ago, “reading is parasitic on speech.” However learning to read is not a straightforward matter because, at a minimum, it involves breaking a code that maps spoken language on to written language. How difficult it is to break the code, and how much else there is to learn before reaching an adult level of proficiency will depend on a wide range of factors, some intrinsic and others extrinsic to the child, including the language of learning. In the first edition of this book, these themes were developed in the chapter by Byrne (2005) who proposed that, at first, the child approaches reading with the incorrect hypothesis about what print represents. As a consequence, what needs to be taught is what the child does not bring to the learning situation. Focusing on learning to read in English, he argued that it is crucial for children to gain insight into the alphabetic principle – to acquire knowledge of letter‐sound mappings, understand that not all features of the sound stream are represented in the orthography, and that there are one‐to‐many and many‐to‐one correspondences between orthography and phonology. Treiman and Kessler (2005) discussed similar themes in their chapter focusing on the principles children need to understand when learning to write words, and the difficulties these pose. They also consider how the ease of learning to spell depends on the orthography children are learning. It is difficult to segment the speech stream into phonemic units, and therefore alphabetic systems are hard to learn; children with better phoneme awareness do better in this regard and letter knowledge can bootstrap the process.
In this second edition, Hamilton and Hayiou‐Thomas take a broader view of the skills that children bring to the task of learning to read and are required to secure a strong foundation. Emphasizing the importance of the quality (and not just quantity) of oral language input in the pre‐school years, they review evidence on how the home literacy environment prepares children for reading and how variation in this environment can limit as well as foster their success, touching on similar issues to those explored by Phillips and Lonigan (2005). The roles of factors that are extrinsic and intrinsic to the child (including genetic factors that place them at risk of reading or language problems) are considered drivers of learning and Hamilton and Hayiou‐Thomas emphasize a “division of labour” between the learner and their environment (Byrne, 1998). Their over‐arching message is that learning to read builds on language skills, honed through interactions among the child, the caregiver, and the book.
Castles and Nation take up the issue of how, after taking the first steps into literacy, children learn to identify words efficiently. Making a distinction between the development of sublexical and lexical level processes, they argue that sublexical learning takes precedence early in development (at a time when the child must learn the relationships between print and sound), and lexical processes gain precedence later in development with increasing exposure to print. Key to the acquisition of expertise is the process of statistical learning – while explicit instruction in phonics encourages the development of sublexical processes, rich and varied reading experience supports orthographic learning more implicitly. They discuss interactions between sublexical and lexical knowledge, and describe the task of learning to read as one in which the reading system comes to embody the structure of the writing system, paving the way to the markers of skilled word recognition discussed in the first part of this handbook.
There are synergies here with what Ehri (2005) referred to as the development of “sight‐word reading” in the first edition of this book. She proposed that following a stage of early reading when children are beginning to use the alphabetic principle, development is a process of assimilating mappings between orthographic and phonological word forms and meaning in a single memory system. Castles and Nation’s model does not distinguish stages of development, but rather argues for item‐level developmental interactions between sublexical and lexical systems during a protracted phase of learning with a “lexical” tuning process ensuring the adaptation of the reading system for the orthography it is learning, as children’s reading experience increases.
Learning to spell is arguably a more daunting task than learning to read
