In Ehri's model, which stage is characterized by decoding unfamiliar words with three to four sounds and recognizing sight words automatically?

• A. Consolidated Alphabetic
• B. Partial Alphabetic
• C. Pre-Alphabetic
• D. Full Alphabetic

Answer: (D)

In Ehri’s framework, the Consolidated Alphabetic stage is where word reading becomes fast and flexible because readers recognize many words automatically by familiar letter patterns and chunks, rather than decoding every letter in isolation. At this point, learners store common graphos-phonemic patterns (such as digraphs, prefixes, suffixes, and morphemes) and use them to recognize words quickly. They can also still decode unfamiliar words, but by applying known patterns to larger units (for example, recognizing onsets and rimes or morphemic chunks), which often involves reading words that contain about three to four sounds as part of a larger, more efficient process. This combination—automatic sight-word recognition plus the ability to decode using larger units—defines this stage.