Typically developing children seven and eight year olds

Transitional readers also called the orthographic stage (Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985) or consolidated alphabetic stage (Ehri, 1998, 1999, 2005). Kim (2010) purports that children in this stage are able to process larger orthographic units which reduce working memory load and enable readers to read more efficiently. Children have also developed sight words that enable them to read without the support of patterned or familiar text. When they encounter unfamiliar words, they are able to quickly recognise chunks of words and reason by analogy to known words. Transitional readers know a lot about decoding words, but they benefit from instruction in more complex orthographic concepts use in reading …show more content…
Spelling by analogy becomes more evident for unknown words. For example, children recognise that ‘wh’ will come at the beginning of the words like who and where and not at the end of words. Their reading is faster with more automatic problem solving and read out loud changes to silent reading. Children in the transitional stage could also spell single – syllable words correctly but only words containing the short vowel sounds. In multi-syllable words children in this stage may still make errors in unaccented syllables (Bear et al., 2004, p. 29). They use a chunking system to write and spell mono- and polysyllabic words in parts rather than one letter for each sound. It is important to note that chunks may represent the sounds in a word, but correct spelling patterns may not yet be present. They also recognise rhyme spelling pattern (orthographic patterns) for example –ain in words such as pain, brain and main. Within this stage as well they also move into morphological awareness of words for instance, syllables and affixes( prefixes, suffixes ) and other types of inflectional endings (Bear et al., 2004). As a result, transitional writers begin to assimilate the conventional alternative for representing sounds, moving from a dependence on phonology (sound) for representing words to a reliance on visual representation and an understanding of the structure of