What Is Orthographic Knowledge?

Abstract

With consensus on what orthographic knowledge is and how it should be measured, practitioners should be better prepared for assessing orthographic knowledge and implementing instructional practices accordingly.

Improving Preservice Teachers’ Phonemic Awareness, Morphological Awareness and Orthographic Knowledge

“…For example, if a child is trying to spell the word chip, they need to be able to identify that it starts with a /ʧ/sound. Orthographic awareness includes letter-sound knowledge (e.g., sh makes a /ʃ/ sound) and knowledge of spelling patterns within words (e.g., 'ay' typically represents the /eI/ sound at the end of a syllable) (Apel, 2011). Morphological awareness includes knowledge about the meaningful parts of words including word roots (e.g., dieter, dietician) and affixes (e.g., uneasy, bussed, lazy etc.)…”

“…The instruction focused on the following primary areas: phoneme-grapheme knowledge and orthographic pattern awareness (Apel, 2011). Examples of activities included: mapping speech to print; recognising common ways to represent consonant and vowel sounds; identifying long and short vowels; words sorts to become familiar with common orthographic patterns (e.g., final 'tch' versus 'ch'), consonant doubling rule etc.…”

Orthography and Modality Influence Speech Production in Adults and Children

“…Therefore, even tasks that do not directly involve the printed word but are completed exclusively by listening or speaking may show evidence of the influence of the orthographic characteristics of the stimuli (e.g., Frith, 1998;Rastle, McCormick, Bayliss, & Davis, 2011). Orthographic knowledge involves rules for how a letter represents a speech sound, rules regarding permissible combinations of letters, and rules regarding positional and contextual letter constraints (Apel, 2011).…”

Enhancing Phonological Awareness and Orthographic Knowledge of Preservice Teachers: An Intervention through Online Coursework

“…Phonological awareness includes syllable awareness (a/ni/mal = 3 syllables), onset-rime awareness (onset in rust is /r/ rime is ust), and phoneme awareness (r/u/s/t is 4 phonemes). Orthographic knowledge refers to the information that is stored in memory that tells us how to represent spoken language in written form (Apel, 2011). For example knit is represented in writing with a /kn/, even though there are three phonemes /n/ /i/ and /t/.…”