What is the Alphabetic Principle?

Definitions:

• Alphabetic Awareness: Knowledge of letters of the alphabet coupled with the understanding that the alphabet represents the sounds of spoken language and the correspondence of spoken sounds to written language.
• Alphabetic Understanding: Understanding that the left-to-right spellings of printed words represent their phonemes from first to last.
• Continuous Sound: A sound that can be prolonged (stretched out) without distortion (e.g., r, s, a, m).
• Decodable Text: Text in which the majority of words can be identified using their most common sounds. Reading materials in which a high percentage of words are linked to phonics lessons using letter-sound correspondences children have been taught. Decodable text is an intermediate step between reading words in isolation and authentic literature. These texts are used to help students focus their attention on the sound-symbol relationships they are learning. Effective decodable texts contain some sight words that allow for the development of more interesting stories.
• Decoding: The process of using letter-sound correspondences to recognize words.
• Grapheme: The individual letter or sequence of written symbols (e.g., a, b, c) and the multiletter units (e.g., ch, sh, th) that are used to represent a single phoneme.
• Irregular Word: A word that cannot be decoded because either (a) the sounds of the letters are unique to that word or a few words, or (b) the student has not yet learned the letter-sound correspondences in the word.
• Letter Combination: A group of consecutive letters that represents a particular sound(s) in the majority of words in which it appears.
• Letter-Sound Correspondence: A phoneme (sound) associated with a letter.
• Most Common Sound: The sound a letter most frequently makes in a short, one syllable word, (e.g., red, blast). Click here to see a list of the most common sounds of single letters.
• Nonsense or Pseudoword: A word in which the letters make their most common sounds but the word has no commonly recognized meaning (e.g., tist, lof).
• Orthography: A system of symbols for spelling.
• Phonological Recoding: Translation of letters to sounds to words to gain lexical access to the word.
• Regular Word: A word in which all the letters represent their most common sound.
• Sight Word Reading: The process of reading words at a regular rate without vocalizing the individual sounds in a word (i.e., reading words the fast way).
• Sounding Out: The process of saying each sound that represents a letter in a word without stopping between sounds.
• Stop Sound: A sound that cannot be prolonged (stretched out) without distortion. A short, plosive sound (e.g., p, t, k).
• VCe Pattern Word: Word pattern in which a single vowel is followed by a consonant, which, in turn, is followed by a final e (i.e., lake, stripe, and smile).