At which stage of spelling development do students use single letters for words?

The semiphonetic stage of spelling development is characterized by students beginning to understand the relationship between sounds and letters, but they do not yet grasp the full complexity of spelling rules. At this stage, learners often represent whole words with single letters, such as using the letter "b" to stand for a word like "by." This indicates that while they are experimenting with spelling, their grasp of how sounds correspond to letters is still developing.

The other stages represent different levels of understanding and complexity in spelling. For example, the precommunicative stage shows little to no understanding of letter-sound relationships, while the phonetic stage involves spelling that closely matches the sounds in words, often using several letters to represent phonemes. The conventional stage is when students start to use standard spelling rules accurately. Thus, the semiphonetic stage clearly aligns with the use of single letters for words, as learners are starting to explore the basics of phoneme representation without fully developing their spelling skills.