Pre-alphabetic
students read words by memorizing their visual features or guessing words from their context
Early Alphabetic
students recognize some letters of the alphabet and can use them together with context to remember words by sight
Later Alphabetic
readers possess extensive working knowledge of the graphophonemic system, and they can use this knowledge to analyze fully the connections between graphemes and phonemes in words; they can decode unfamiliar words and store fully analyzed sight words in memory
Consolidated Alphabetic
students consolidate their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme blends into larger units that recur in different words