a. Ehri used first and second grade students in order to prove that the letters of words are needed in order to remember a word well. She finds that students who learned a psuedoword learned it faster when shown the spelling of the word than they did if the word was not shown or if they saw the word spelled incorrectly. She also found a high correlation between students remembering these pseudowords well and students who recognize high frequency words quickly.
b. Ehri believes that once children understand that letters make individual sounds, that the next step isn’t phonemic awareness but graphophonemic awareness. Because a a phoneme could consist of more than one letter it is difficult of beginning readers to know which letters are one phoneme and which sound they will make. She believes that need to have a stronger understanding of how graphemes and phonemes work together.
