development, they start processing whole chunks of common
letter sequences, or patterns, together.z Children at the pattern stage of development realize a few things
they did not know in the alphabet stage:
ż First, every letter does not make a sound in English; there are
some silent letters.
ż Second, these silent letters provide important information, such
as marking another vowel as long.ż Third, the “one letter at a time” strategy won’t work for
all words. Thus, children at this stage learn to read letters
in frequently occurring patterns, processing entire parts of
words simultaneously.z To get the idea of the type of patterns we learn in this layer of
spelling, consider the words peach and patch. With long vowel
sounds in such words, as in peach, the /ch/ sound at the end
is usually spelled c-h. With short vowel sounds, as in patch, the
/ch/ sound at the end is usually spelled t-c-h. Most adults don’t
consciously realize this pattern, but it, too, demonstrates the
regularity of English spelling.
z If Anglo-Saxon Old English was responsible for the alphabetic
layer in English, the patterns came from the period of the Norman
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English. This, in turn, led to a host of new vowel sounds represented
by new vowel patterns entering English with the new words.
ż As we said, children at this pattern stage spell eerily like “little
Anglo-Normans.” For example, a child at this stage might spell
the word sweet as s-w-e-t-e, the same way Chaucer spelled
sweet in the 1300s.
ż What’s interesting here is not that this child’s spelling is
“wrong” but that it demonstrates what the child knows. In this
case, the child knows the pattern of marking a long vowel with