The 'alphabetic' stage (age 6-7)

This stage is typical of children aged about 6 to 7. They begin to use phonic strategies - attempting to 'sound out' words they don't yet know as wholes, and writing a single letter or multi-letter grapheme for each phoneme, sometimes making 'letter-name' errors in the process. They may continue to write words they knew at the logographic stage as before, or try to write (some of) those words phonically and thus stray from the correct spelling to a homophonic one, before returning to the correct version. For example, a child may have learnt walked as a unit, then hear the final phoneme accurately as /t/ and write walkt, before deducing that all regular verbs in English have their past tense and participle written with <-ed>, whether the ending is pronounced /t/ as in walked, /d/ as in played, or /Id/ as in wanted.

At this stage children are beginning to grasp the alphabetic principle that spoken and written words have sub-units which relate to each other. But given that the process of sounding-out phonemes and choosing a grapheme for each phoneme is both abstract and a strain on short-term memory, spellings at this stage are often incomplete, or have only the first letter correct, or have letters in the wrong order, or too many letters, or wrong graphemes which do not produce the correct sound of the target word. All of this means that there is considerable variation within the alphabetic stage, but there is as yet no consensus on how it might be subdivided.

Error patterns characteristic of this stage:

• Main categories: Many substitutions and grapheme substitutions, fewer omissions, some insertions or transpositions
• Subordinate categories: Real but wrong words, non-homophones, omission of 'silent' letters, pronunciation effects, still some letter-name errors, a few homophones

During this stage the main teaching strategy needs to be 'phonics alert to its limitations'. Many words that children of this age wish to write will yield to sounding-out and writing letters in the right order, but they will also need to add more 'tricky' words to the high-frequency ones they have already learnt as units. For example, there are only about 60 words in the language in which /e/ (the so-called 'short <e>' sound) is spelt <ea>, but there is no possible rule for distinguishing them from those in which /e/ is spelt <e>, so teachers just have to say, for example, 'Remember /e/ is <ea> in bread, breakfast, breath, feather, head, heaven, instead, lead (the metal), pleasant, read (past tense and participle), ready, weather.'

'Silent' letters: For children who persistently omit these, the traditional terminology may be confusing (since all letters are silent, when you think about it). It may be more helpful to say, for example, 'How do we spell /r/ at the beginning of writing and wrong? How do we spell /n/ at the beginning of knife and know? How do we write /m/ at the end of comb and thumb?'