ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how young children, as they learn to read, add information to their understanding of how words are spelled. Research in the past 15 years has shown the developmental path that children tread in their systematic growth as spellers (Henderson & Beers, 1980; Henderson & Templeton, 1986). In the earliest efforts made by young children to write words, alphabetic knowledge plays a major role in signaling how to represent initial consonants and prominent sounds in words. This is an incomplete strategy because letter names alone, in their fundamental pronunciation, cannot be used to spell words accurately (for example, Indian might be rendered NDN).
