ABSTRACT
Children who are learning to read have certain intellectual skills and these too are changing as they grow up. Marsh thought that the form of children's reading must be heavily influenced by the stage of intellectual development that they happen to be at. The theory has the weakness that it confines itself to phonemes when it deals with phonological awareness, and to grapheme-phoneme correspondences when it deals with phonological codes in reading. Uta Frith, whose work on reading and spelling devised a three-stage theory of reading. In the first stage children read words as logograms, in the second they also apply grapheme-phoneme rules, and in the third they begin as well to analyse words " into orthographic units without phonological conversion". The phonological skill that they bring to reading and writing is the ability to divide a word into its onset and its rime and also to categorise words which have the same onset or the same rime.
