What is Orthographic Mapping and why is it important

If you’re a parent of a child with dyslexia, you’ve probably heard a lot of terms thrown around: phonemic awareness, fluency, decoding, sight words… and maybe now, orthographic mapping. It sounds technical, but understanding this one concept can completely change how you support your child’s reading journey.

So what is orthographic mapping—and why does it matter so much?

Orthographic Mapping in Plain English

Readers initially use decoding techniques to read unfamiliar words, but then after enough practice, the brain stores the sight and sound of the entire word in long term memory, and the fluent reader simply retrieves the sound from memory instead of “sounding it out.”  This process of taking an unfamiliar printed word and turning it into an immediately recognizable word is known as “orthographic mapping” (Kilpatrick, 2015). It is how our brain stores written words so we can recognize them instantly, without sounding them out each time.

It’s not memorization in the traditional sense—it's how we permanently anchor a word's spelling, sound, and meaning together in memory. Once a word is orthographically mapped, your child doesn’t have to “sound it out” anymore. They connected the sounds to the letters and mapped it to meaning. In other words: Orthographic mapping is the brain’s way of reading words automatically.

Why It's a Big Deal for Dyslexic Learners

Taking a step back, children with dyslexia often struggle with something called phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in words. That’s a problem, because strong phonemic awareness is the foundation of orthographic mapping (Ehri, 2014).

If your child can’t consistently pull apart the individual sounds in “shop” (/sh/ /o/ /p/), it’s much harder to map that word to its spelling. Without that mapping process, reading never becomes fluent—it stays laborious.

That’s why so many dyslexic students look like they can decode but still can’t read smoothly or remember words they’ve seen dozens of times. Their brains haven’t built the neural connections to lock in those words for instant recall.

Orthographic mapping explains why kids don’t need to memorize hundreds of “sight words” by shape or guess based on context. It supports what research has shown again and again: kids learn to read through sound-based decoding, not guessing or memorizing word shapes (Kilpatrick, 2015).

When instruction skips the sound-letter connection, children may look like they're reading—but they’re often faking fluency. That’s not real reading. Orthographic mapping ensures they’re actually learning to read, not just coping.

What you can do as a Parent

Letter-sound knowledge – immediately knowing which letters match which sounds.

  • Have your child practice letter-sound recall using sound cards so they can practice and gain immediate recall for all letters and sounds. For example they should be able to instantly recall that sh says /sh/ or that c can say /k/ or /s/.

  • You may need to explicitly teach (or reteach) your child some or all phonics rules even if their school may have already gone through the whole phonics sequence. It’s possible that your child didn’t quite grasp some concepts, and then the teacher had to move on for the sake of the group. Reteaching your child means they have an opportunity to grasp the concepts and then apply them. For example, the magic e rule. An e at the end makes the vowel say its name, as in “game". Notice which words your child is misreading or struggling with, and make a list of phonics rules to review with them. Check for understanding when you are teaching a rule, and give them enough practice so it’s automatic for them.

    Phonemic awareness – the ability to identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words.

  • Now that your child knows sh says /sh/, if you say to your child, “take the word ship and remove the s”, the child should think, sh says sh, but h says /h/.. hip! If you ask your child to change the i to o, they can say the new word is hop. This is phoneme manipulation and deletion/addition, otherwise known as phonemic awareness. Play sound games like this with your child to strengthen phonemic awareness.

  • Incorporate elkonin boxes. I use these with my daughter and she enjoys it! They are a simple visual tool to give multisensory phonemic awareness practice and visually help children see, hear, and break apart the individual sounds in a word. Elkonin boxes train the brain to hear and isolate sounds, which is the foundation of phonemic awareness. Kids with dyslexia often struggle to hear the separate sounds in words. This tool slows things down and makes those sounds visible and concrete. Once your child can break words into sounds, they’re ready to start connecting those sounds to letters—that’s when we can start the process of orthographic mapping. Which leads us to:

Practice applying both together – exposure to decoding letters into phonemes into words allows for instant recognition

  • Choose decodable books with the sounds your child has already learned to give them a chance to practice decoding

  • Discourage guessing which interferes with permanent storage (Ehri, 2005), and instead, encourage them to take their time reading.

  • Be patient! Kilpatrick estimates 1-4 exposures are needed when orthographic mapping is strong, but research says that dyslexic students need more exposures - often five to ten TIMES more (Shaywitz, 2003). Circling back to the recommendation for using elkonin boxes, multisensory instruction is known to reduce the number of exposures by activating multiple pathways in the brain - visual, auditory, kinesthetic - which should help a dyslexic student learn more efficiently and retain the information longer (Moats, 2020).

Remember, this isn’t about just memorizing. Sight word memorization for words that can be decoded is actually inefficient. It’s just the child memorizing a word like it’s one symbol, but it’s not possible to do that for every word in the english language - and it won’t help them spell the word. Kilpatrick says that without strong orthographic mapping, the student may need dozens of exposures and still forget the word ultimately. Your child needs to create deeper, long term memory connections through immediate memory of sound-letter matches. In other words, you can’t skip over the part of breaking down the phonemes and decoding - that part IS the orthographic mapping process. You can’t go over it. You have to go through it.

Sources:

  • Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167–188.

  • Kilpatrick, D. A. (2015). Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties. Wiley.

  • Moats, L. C. (2020). Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers. Brookes Publishing.

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