What is the Alphabetic Principle?
On the last Friday in October, I was out in the community as most of you know, (rather than being stowed away in my teaching space lol!) and I got to meet some really cool people. I also got to talk nonstop about the Science of Reading, how the brain is (not) wired to read, and how teaching through evidence-based practice is the best way for the brain to learn to read, spell, and write. I was in my element, I can totally talk your ear off if you give me half a chance about all of the above and then some.
There were a couple of things I noticed, however. Number one is that I now realise that most of the time I’m in a little ‘bubble’, surrounded by people who understand my lingo. If I drop the words phoneme, grapheme, encode, decode, alphabetic principle, or phonological awareness, I know most if not all will understand me and not glaze over staring at a point past my shoulder. The second was when I broke down some of these concepts to people who have not heard of them before, it was a really gratifying experience to see their eyes light up as they understood how these things ‘click’ together for the purpose of reading and writing.
The best ‘aha’ moment was when I explained the alphabetic principle and phonological awareness to parents and how they can use this knowledge to support reading and spelling. In a nutshell, the alphabetic principle is a critical skill that involves connecting letters with their sounds to read and write. It takes time to teach and involves lots of practice and repetition. A good example of the alphabetic principle in action is knowing that the s makes a sssss sound, or the letter n makes an nnnnnn sound.
When we know the correct sounds the letters make, we can apply the alphabetic principle to reading (decoding) by taking each letter and sounding it out, eg s a m, and then blending it back together to form the word ‘Sam’. When applying the alphabetic principle to spelling (encoding) we can take the word ‘Sam’, isolate the individual sounds s a m, and write the corresponding letter that goes with that sound.
Simple right? Yes and no. As mentioned, it takes time to teach and involves lots of practice, and in English there are roughly 44 sounds and their corresponding letter formations that need to be taught and learned. There are also words that contain irregular sounds like the words was, said, and the. Parts of these words are not behaving as they should! But…. and this is the best part – the more we know and understand, the more we can support our tamariki with their journey to become literate. If you know that letters make sounds and sounds are represented by letters, and there are some words that have sounds that are misbehaving – you are one step forward and closer to an understanding of some of the components of literacy!