Which concept states that written spelling represents spoken word?

• A. Bottom Up
• B. Anchor Book
• C. Cues
• D. Alphabetic Principle

Answer: (D)

The key idea here is that written spelling mirrors spoken language. This is the Alphabetic Principle: letters and letter patterns map to the sounds (phonemes) of spoken words, and their order in writing reflects the order of those sounds. Because of this principle, readers decode by sounding out letters and blending the phonemes to form words, and writers spell by representing the sounds they hear with letters.

Understanding this helps explain why phonics instruction is crucial—teaching which sounds go with which letters, how sounds blend together, and how to segment words into individual phonemes. It also clarifies how English spelling works: there are systematic relationships between sounds and letters, even though there are many irregularities.

Other terms you might see refer to different ideas. Bottom Up describes a processing approach to reading, focusing on decoding from letters up to meaning rather than on the specific sound-letter relationship. Anchor Book and Cues relate more to instructional strategies for comprehension and text use, not to how written spelling represents spoken words.