7 How does orthographic learning happen ?

Word recognition develops with such remarkable speed that, by the end of eighth grade, we expect children learning to read English to know and recognize over 80,000 words (Adams, 1990). At a basic level, beginning readers must establish a system of mappings or correspondences between the letters or graphemes of written words and the phonemes of spoken words (Ehri, 1992), and it is generally thought that this alphabetic decoding system is underpinned by phonological skills (Brady & Shankweiler, 1991; Byrne, 1998; Goswami & Bryant, 1990). To become an accurate and efficient reader of the English language, however, children need to do more than assemble or decode pronunciations on the basis of spelling-sound mappings. They need to acquire a rapid and flexible word-recognition system that embodies knowledge of both the regularities and the irregularities of the English orthography. While it is clear that the development of skilled word recognition requires more than the mastery of alphabetic decoding, we know very little about exactly what is required beyond this, and how this is achieved. An advanced stage of reading development beyond the alphabetic stage, often referred to as the orthographic stage (e.g. Frith, 1985), is typically represented in developmental theories of reading acquisition, but such a stage tends to be posited, rather than described in terms of exactly how it is reached. Andrews and Scarratt (1996, p. 141) sum up the issue nicely: