Which statement demonstrates decoding by spelling the word party?

• A. Says, 'You have to put the letters in the right order when you write my name.'
• B. Writes cts to represent the word cats
• C. Writes the letters to spell the word party
• D. Produces the correct sounds for 10-20 letters

Answer: (C)

Decoding by spelling means turning the sounds you hear in a word into the letters that represent those sounds. When someone writes the letters to spell party, they are mapping the spoken sounds /p/ /ɑːr/ /t/ /i/ to P-A-R-T-Y, showing they can convert sounds into the written form. This is precisely what decoding in spelling looks like—taking phonemes and producing the corresponding letter sequence.

The other statements don’t demonstrate this sound-to-letter mapping. Talking about putting letters in the right order refers to general writing order rather than decoding sounds into letters. Writing cts for cats is an abbreviated, vowel-skipping representation and doesn’t fully spell the word from its sounds. Producing the correct sounds for many letters shows articulation or phonemic awareness, not the act of encoding those sounds into the correct spelling.