ABSTRACT
There may have been a time when we thought that it began with reading instruction, but students of emergent literacy have persuaded us that many children know a great deal about reading before they enter school. It is common to think of writing as a code and reading as decoding. Ciphers in contrast are systematic, like using kbnft cpoe to encode the same message. It should be clear that in this narrower sense English orthography is a cipher rather than a code. The orthographic cipher of English (in short, the cipher) is very complex. When children begin to internalize the cipher their way of reading changes. The acquisition of the cipher not only has consequences for the probability that the child will make a reading error, but it also influences the nature of that error. The acquisition of the cipher has profound consequences for the child's reading and spelling.
