Frith in 1985 developed a theory of how children learnt to read. He identified three stages:
1. "Look and say". In this stage the child learns to recognise a certain number of common whole words. This stage corresponds to the "whole word" reading route described above.
2. "Letter by letter". In this stage the child learns to recognise a word by building up the sounds of each letter and combining the sounds. This stage corresponds to the "sound-of-the-letters" reading route described above.
3. Word analysis. In this stage a complicated word like 'singing' is analysed into more basic structures ('sing' and '-ing') and the meaning built up from the structures.
Clearly, older children will use all of these methods in combination in order to learn new words. Also, mature readers will use all three methods in combination when reading.
Learning to write also involves three stages: the "whole word" stage where
a whole word in extracted from the storehouse of words in the brain; the
"sound-of-the-letters" stage where the sound of a word is broken up into the
sounds of the letters, which are written down in sequence; and the
word-analysis stage where a complex word like 'singing' is built up from a
core segment and an ending.
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