Semiphonetic StageĪfter children have experimented with imitative writing and developed an awareness of alphabet letter names, a shift occurs. Reading at this stage is "logographic," meaning that a child guesses at whole words based on their visual features (Ehri, 1994).
Although they may know the names of some letters, recognize letter forms, and realize that letters represent speech sounds, they may not understand what a word is or realize that print represents words and that spaces represent boundaries between them. Most young children who are exposed to print in their homes spontaneously begin to experiment with writing. It's that cycle of success that teachers love to see develop: Learning begets learning. Word knowledge builds systematically on other word knowledge. At more advanced levels, spelling memory draws on a child's knowledge of word structure, words' meaningful parts, a word's relationship to other words, and so on. Spelling memory - memory for letter sequences - is enhanced by a child's awareness of phonemes, or speech sounds. While visual memory - more specifically, "orthographic" memory - is vital for learning to spell, it doesn't work alone. Second, we also now understand that spelling memory is dependent on a child's growing knowledge of spoken and written word structure.
They have found, instead, that two important processes come into play concerning spelling.įirst, we now know that a child learns to spell in a roughly predictable series of steps that build on one another (Ehri 1986, 1994 Gill, 1992 Henderson, 1990).
Researchers have discovered that a child's memory for words is not entirely or even principally rote. But that thinking has changed in the last 20 years. Psychologists once believed that children learned to spell by using rote visual memory to string letters together like beads on a necklace.