The 'orthographic' stage (from about 8)

From about age 8 most children have many more words firmly in long-term memory and write them as units. When attempting to write unfamiliar words, they will try to represent all the phonemes of the spoken words in the correct order, but will often produce homophone errors. They are also typically more aware not only of different ways of spelling phonemes but also of word families and spelling patterns which guide choices between graphemes, and use them to write unfamiliar words - all of which are visual and not phonic strategies - the nature of English orthography demands both. They will have begun to master the rules for consonant-doubling, <e>-deletion and <y>- replacement, and the use of 'magic <e>'.

Error patterns characteristic of this stage:

• Main categories: Many grapheme substitutions, some omissions, few errors in other main categories
• Subordinate categories: Homophones, 'magic <e>' wrongly omitted (e.g. bak for bake, using <a> to 'spell its name') or retained (e.g. bakeing), stem-final consonant letters not or wrongly doubled, stem-final <y> wrongly retained, '<i> before/after <e>' errors

Some children (and adults) at this stage may well benefit from learning (the few) explicit rules that actually work, e.g. for doubling final consonant letters before suffixes beginning with vowel letters, and for deleting final <e> also before suffixes beginning with vowel letters, especially if these are contrasted, for example in hopping and hoping. But for many words there is no substitute for just memorising.

Beyond this point there is what might be called the 'dictionary' or 'correct spelling' stage (none of the stage theories seem to give this stage a convincing label - for some suggestions see Ehri, 2005: 139) - in other words, most people get the spelling of most of the words they write correct. But for some people, as already noted, some spelling choices remain so problematic they are never fully internalised.