Lecture 31: Spelling as a Vocabulary Tool
ż Second, children at this stage operate under the principle that
every letter makes a sound and that we read and spell in left-to-
right, linear fashion.ż Third, children in this stage have the same basic spelling logic
as the Anglo-Saxons.Pattern Layer
z Many critics of the English spelling system would have us stop at
the alphabetic layer. They believe that we should just spell words
“the way they sound”—that a system based on a one-to-one
correspondence between letters and sounds would be much better.
ż What if we spelled hate the way it sounds, with one letter for
HDFKVRXQG":HFRXOGQ¶WXVHWKHVLOHQWe because every letter
must make a sound. That would leave us with h-a-t, but we
already have a word spelled that way. This example shows us
why the alphabetic layer alone isn’t enough.ż A long-vowel word, such as hate, is a perfect example of how
the next layer of spelling information comes into play: the
pattern layer.z Notice a few things about the word hate that are different from the
alphabetic later.
ż First, not every letter makes a sound; the e is silent.ż Second, this silent e is present for a good reason: It makes
the preceding vowel long, in this case, a. This is an important
concept in English orthography: We usually mark long vowel
sounds with a silent letter.ż Finally, we can’t read the word hate one letter at a time because
when we get to the silent e, we would have to go back to
make the a long. In other words, we have to process the -ate
ending in hate as a single pattern or chunk. And this is where
the pattern layer comes in. When children reach this stage of