What is the primary ability of students in the orthographic phase?

The primary ability of students in the orthographic phase is to recognize and understand the patterns of how letters and letter combinations form words, which closely ties into sounding out unfamiliar words. At this stage, students have progressed beyond basic phonics and are becoming more adept at recognizing common spelling patterns and word structures. This phase involves a higher level of automaticity in decoding; they start to apply their knowledge of phoneme-grapheme relationships and can decode words more quickly and efficiently.

The focus here is on the skill of decoding—being able to take an unknown or unfamiliar word and apply the rules of phonics they have learned to read it accurately. This understanding allows them to make connections between the sounds of language (phonemes) and their written representations (graphemes), which is essential for fluent reading.

Recognizing shapes of words relates more to visual recognition than to the processing of speech sounds, and focusing on word meaning involves comprehension rather than decoding. Understanding phoneme patterns is a related skill that supports decoding but is not the primary focus during the orthographic phase, where the emphasis is specifically on directly sounding out and efficiently reading words.