Developing Early Literacy Skills: The Alphabetic Principle

The Alphabetic Principle: Connecting Letters to Sounds

Many of us remember early learning experiences when our teachers or parents instructed us to “sound out” a word in order to read it. The technical term for this is blending, and it is the alphabetic principle in action.

The alphabetic principle connects letters with their individual sounds and is essential to reading and writing English. The alphabetic principle recognizes that there is a systematic and predictable relationship between written letters and spoken sounds. Phonological awareness skills—along with the ability to recognize individual sounds in spoken words—are necessary elements to mastering the alphabetic principle. Achieving automaticity while associating sounds with individual letters is key to fluent reading and writing.

For example, students who know that the written letter “m” makes the /mmm/ sound are demonstrating the alphabetic principle.

There are two parts to the alphabetic principle:

1. Understanding that words are made up of letters that represent the sounds of speech.

2. Phonological recoding: knowing how to translate the letters in printed words into the sounds they make in order to read and pronounce the words correctly.

Once students learn and begin to use the alphabetic principle fluently and automatically, they can focus their attention on understanding the meaning of the text, which is the primary purpose of reading. 

This process takes time. It can be difficult for students—and for good reason!

Students learning English must:

• Learn the sounds to many letters
• Understand that letters can be arranged in a multitude of ways to represent different printed words
• Grasp the idea that the same letter can represent more than one sound, depending upon the word

Phonemes and Graphemes

Phonemes are unique units of sound that can distinguish one word from another. For example, /b/ and /m/ are different phonemes in English. A grapheme is a symbol—in this case, a letter or set of letters—that represents a phoneme. Graphemes range from one letter to four in English: i, ou, igh, ough, for example. When students are able to blend individual sounds into a recognizable English word, they’ve unlocked the ability to read thousands of phonetically regular words. 

Whereas romance languages, including Spanish, have a high degree of correlation between graphemes and phonemes, written English can be represented with many different letters and letter combinations (graphemes). 

The many rules and high number of exceptions to those rules in the English language make it much more complex than Spanish. Spanish letters are highly predictable, typically representing only one sound regardless of the word they are in, and Spanish has very few rule exceptions.

English letters, however, often represent multiple phonemes. For example, the letter “s” on its own can represent three or more different sounds. These include /s/ as in sit, /z/ as in dogs, and /zh/ as in usual. 

As another example, most of us were taught that English has long and short vowels and that they are, “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y.” In reality, there are quite a few more! Consider /oy/, /ow/, and /er/ (the last being an example of “r-controlled vowels” such as in car, her, shirt, and for). So-called long and short vowels are only part of our English vowel sounds.

Irregular Words

On one end of the spectrum, words in the English language can be accurately read using predictable, one-to-one correspondences between graphemes and phonemes (cat, sit, pan). The other end of the spectrum contains a copious amount of unpredictable grapheme–phoneme correspondences (the, could, said). 

Using the alphabetic principle to blend the letters “k-n-o-w” would not lead anyone to pronounce, read, or write the word no. Consequently, a different teaching approach must be used for those words that cannot be accurately pronounced using phonics rules. This is especially important because many irregular words are commonly used, and without the ability to read these high-frequency words, students are unable to read connected text.

PreK Phonics Instruction

Focusing on the alphabetic principle in preschool ensures students enter kindergarten with the essential foundational skills they need to “crack the code” in order to read. Keeping in mind that play is a child’s work, educators can choose to teach the alphabetic principle using fun and effective instructional settings and routines.

Daily Routines

• Letter identification and letter sounds can be introduced in a whole-group setting using engaging activities such as songs and games. This can happen during morning meetings, transition times, read-alouds, and journaling, and be embedded within play centers.
• Targeted small-group lessons of 8–12 minutes allow for intentional instruction tailored to each student’s own needs.
• The “I Do, We Do, You Do” model.
• Read-alouds: reinforcing letter–sound relationships during story time.
• Journaling and shared writing: modeling explicit letter–sound correspondence while students practice writing through scribbles, letter-like forms, or inventive spelling.
• Centers and play: providing environmental print and writing prompts within play areas to allow students to practice letters in a contextualized way.
• Transition songs.

Key Instructional Takeaways

The Alphabetic Principle Comes First

Help PreK students grasp the idea that letters are the pictures of the sounds they hear in words.

Sequence Instruction Strategically

There is a most effective progression to introducing letters. High-frequency letters and their common sounds should be introduced before moving to those that are less common. 

Sound–Symbol Association 

“Show, don’t tell.” Teaching should explicitly pair the sounds students hear with specific letter combinations. For example, showing that the /s/ sound is represented by the letter “s” in sit.

Blending Sounds 

Teachers can help their students begin to blend letter sounds into whole words once they have a solid grasp on a few of the high-frequency letters. For example, blending the individual sounds /m/ /a/ /t/ to produce the word mat.

Support Using Visual and Auditory Cues 

A solid foundation can be built by combining lowercase letters, visual cues, and auditory practice.

Introducing Decodable Text 

Some PreK students may be able to begin practicing reading skills with simple books that have a high percentage of words following common phonetic rules, helping them to build fluency.

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Related Reading:

Developing The Big 5 Series:

• Print Concepts
• Phonological Awareness—Part 1
• Phonological Awareness—Part 2
• Oral Language