Ehri's Phases of Word-Reading

Ehri (1996, 2014) conceptualizes word reading development into four phases, prealphabetic, early alphabetic, later alphabetic, and consolidated alphabetic. Each stage illustrates how word-reading develops for typical children between the ages of four and six. The model also demonstrates how phonemic awareness skills and orthographic mapping are crucial foundational skills for children to develop automatic sight word recognition (Moats & Tolman, 2019). The prealphabetic phase is characterized by children not having letter-sound awareness and recognizing words incidentally based on visual features of the word. In the early alphabetic phase, children begin to use some letter-sound correspondence to decode words. Their phonological awareness skills are characterized at the early level where they can break words into syllables, onset-rime, and identify/isolate initial sounds of words. The later alphabetic phase is when children begin to develop automatic sight word recognition and to use letter-sound correspondence. In this phase, they also demonstrate basic phonemic awareness skills of segmenting and blending words with 3-4 phonemes. In the consolidated alphabetic phase, children develop an increasing automatic sight word recognition, orthographic mapping, syllable patterns, morphemes and demonstrate advanced phonemic awareness, including deletion, substitution and reversal of phonemes.

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