Words Their Way
Chapter 5: Word Study for Beginners in the Letter Name-Alphabetic Stage
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Students begin to read and write in conventional ways.
Letter name-alphabetic stage easily spans kindergarten through second grade, a handful of third
grade and a few in upper elementary.fr
Letters have both sounds and names and students in the letter name-alphabetic stage use their
knowledge about the names of the letters in the alphabet to spell phonetically or alphabetically.
Teachers must set a fast pace as soon as possible during the letter name-alphabetic stage,
because success in beginning reading depends on learning the basic phonics elements that are
covered in this stage.
In word study, the earliest sorts are pictures; later, students work with words in families and
words known by sight.
At the beginning of this stage, children may only segment and represent the most salient
beginning and final consonant sounds, demonstrating only partial phonemic awareness.
By the end of the stage, they have full phonemic awareness and are able to isolate the elusive
vowels and to pull apart the tightly meshed blends.
It is critical during the letter name-alphabetic stage to acquire a vocabulary of sight words that
can be recognized automatically in any context.
Students who are in the letter name-alphabetic stage of spelling have acquired a concept of
word—the ability to track or fingerpoint read a memorized text without getting off track on a
two-syllable word.
There are two levels of concept of word in text:
o Rudimentary
o Full
Students with a rudimentary concept of word are able to point and track to the words of a
memorized text using their knowledge of consonants as clues to word boundaries. However,
they get off track with two-syllable words, and then they are asked to find words in that they
read, they are slow and hesitant. In word study, these students are in the early part of the letter
name-alphabetic stage; they need to review beginning consonants and then study blends and
digraphs along the same-vowel word families.
Students with a full concept of word can fingerpoint read accurately, and if they get off track
they can quickly correct themselves without starting all over.
We define sight words as any words that are stored completely enough in memory to be
recognized automatically in and out of context.
o Sight words are best acquired by reading and rereading familiar texts and by analyzing
those known words out of context, in word study.
The term “sight words” is often confused with high-frequency words, which are the most
commonly occurring words in print. Although a reader’s store of sight words will include many
high-frequency words, it is not limited to them. Any word can be a sight word.
Partial alphabetic readers know something about consonants, but they lack the vowel
knowledge needed to sound out words or easily store words in memory.
Interactive writing and recording students’ individual or group dictations are fertile
opportunities for print referencing as well as drawing students’ attention to sound and letter
correspondences.
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Journal writing, written responses to reading, predictions about reading, and other individual
written responses provide authentic reasons to learn about letters and sounds as students are
encourage to “spell as best they can.”
Asking students to simply copy sentences is of little value. It is the hard work of transcribing
speech into print that exercises phonemic awareness and students’ growing understanding of
the orthography.
Read-alouds continue to provide a rich source of new vocabulary as well as complex sentence
structures.
Interactive read-alouds, “turn and talk,” retellings, and dramatizations of stories continue to
play an important role in stimulating oral language and encouraging the use of new vocabulary.
Teachers should look for, gradually teach, and consistently use synonyms for the common
language of everyday routines.
Rather than “dumbing down” our language to children, we should consciously elevate our
language and provide appropriate explanations, repeated exposure, and opportunities for
children to use that same language.
During the early part of the letter name-alphabetic stage, when students have only partial
phonemic awareness, spelling efforts may be limited to the most prominent sounds in syllables,
usually the beginning and ending consonants.
As phonemic awareness improves by the middle part of the stage, students’ spellings gradually
include a vowel in each stressed syllable, and they spell short vowels by matching the way they
articulate the letter names of the vowels.
By the end of the stage, students have learned how to spell many words with short vowels
correctly and with full phonemic awareness they also spell blends.
Affricates are formed by forcing air through a small closure at the roof of the mouth to create a
feeling of friction.
Vowels prose special problems for the letter name-alphabetic spellers, who rely on the names of
letters and how sounds feel in the mouth.
There are some consonants that can be elongated without a vowel; these are continuant
sounds: /f/,/l/,/m/,/n/,/r/,/s/,/v/, and /z/.
Consonant sounds that cannot be held like these are known as stop consonants (b,d,g,k,p,t).
The difference in the medial vowel sounds can be described linguistically as tense and lax. The
vocal chords are tense when producing the long a sound (ate), but relax when producing the
short a sound (at).
Over the course of the letter name-alphabetic stage, students become adept at fully segmenting
words into phonemes, including the medial vowel, and they use the alphabetic principle to
represent each sound with a letter.
Spellers throughout the letter name-alphabetic stage use their knowledge of the alphabet to
find the letter name closest to the place of articulation of the short vowel sound they are trying
to write.
Through word study, students in the letter name-alphabetic stage learn to spell short vowel
words correctly.
Once students have a solid, if not complete, mastery beginning and ending consonant sounds,
they are ready for the study of medial short vowels.
Once students are using (though still confusing) short vowels consistently, they can be asked to
compare short vowels in word sorts that examine the CVC pattern across a variety of vowels.
Word families, which are sometimes called phonograms, consist of groups of rhyming words
such as cat, mat, sat, and bat that are spelled similarly.
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Starting with short a families (at, an, as, ap, ack) seems to be a good choice because these words
abound in early reading. In addition, short a is the least likely short vowel to be confused.
Words like car and for look as though that follow the CVC pattern, but they do not have the
short sounds of a or o. Instead the vowel sounds are subsumed by the r that follows and are
known as r-influenced vowels (or r-controlled vowels).
Once students are spelling perhaps approximately half of the short vowel words correctly on a
spelling inventory and working with mixed-vowel word families easily and accurately, they are
ready for the study of short vowels in nonrhyming words outside of word families.
During the study of short vowels is a good time to introduce the oddball, or miscellaneous
category to accommodate variations in dialect and spelling.
When students are able to spell basic short vowel patterns and also begin to experiment with
long vowel patterns, they have entered the next spelling stage: the within word pattern.
In addition to short vowels, student work through four other features during the letter namealphabetic stage.
o Consonant digraphs
o Consonant blends
o Preconsonantal nasals
o Influences on the vowel from certain surrounding consonants
A digraph is two letters that represent a single sound and they can be taught right along with
other beginning consonants because they only require segmenting and attending to a single
phoneme. Digraphs include: thin, fish, each, when, phone.
o The consonant digraphs to be studied in the letter name-alphabetic stage are ch, sh, th,
and wh.
A consonant blend is a spelling unit (sometimes called a consonant cluster) of two or three
consonants that retain their identity when pronounced. Blends can occur at the beginning or the
ends of syllables. They include: black, clap, trap, just, lisp, mask.
o Beginning consonant blends can be grouped as followed:
 S-blends: sc, sk, sl, sn ,sm, sp, st, sw
 L-blends: bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl
 R-blends: br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr
 Blends with /w/: qu, tw
o Final consonant blends include st, sp, sk, ft, pt, lt, lf, lp. They also include blends with an
r, such as rd, rt, rp
Some final blends are especially difficult, known as preconsonantal nasals, which are nasals that
come right before the final consonant, such as the n in pink.
o Preconsonantal nasals include: mp, nt, nd, and nk
When students begin to spell words with preconsonantal nasals correctly, they are usually at the
end of the letter name-alphabetic stage, and have achieved full consonantal awareness.
Support can come from two sources: the text or the teacher.
Support from the teacher comes from choral reading: to read in unison, or echo reading: read
immediately after the teacher reads.
Word banks are collections of known words gathered from the texts that students have been
reading and rereading. The words are lifted out of context and written on small cards and
collected over time.
o Word banks take extra work but are well worth the effort, particularly for students in
the beginning of this stage who are not making good progress in reading.
o
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When the word bank contains between 150-200 words and the student is at the end of
the letter name-alphabetic stage, the word bank can be discontinued.
Copies of familiar rhymes and jingles, group or individual dictations, or selected passages from
books that the students have read can be collected in a personal reader.
Many teachers have found the following sequence of consonants to be helpful for a review:
o Bmrs
o Tgnp
o Chfd
o Lkjw
o Yzv
Guidelines for word families:
o Use words students can read
o Include words with digraphs and blends once they have been introduced
o Supply supplemental reading materials that feature word families
o Plan follow-up activities
 Word study notebooks can be used to record writing sorts and the results of
word hunts or brainstorming sessions
 Set a fast pace
It is important to monitor student progress in attaining a firm concept of word in text and the
fundamental phonics/spelling features that support the automatic recognition of a basic reading
vocabulary, or sight words.
Not only should children be pointing accurately to words in familiar text without getting off
track on two-syllable words, but by the letter name-alphabetic stage, they should also be
learning some words to add to their sight vocabularies.
Phonemic awareness, phonics, and spelling are all highly related.
The easiest way to monitor progress in sight word development is to keep track of the number
of words in students’ word banks.
Running records can be used to monitor word recognition accuracy in context.