Decoding Strategies

This summer I worked with a rising kindergartener. I was impressed that he knew all his letter names and could write his name all before entering school. He could even repeat back a familiar book that his mother had read to him. However, I soon discovered he could not read actual words yet.

Why not?

Because he had not yet learned how to decode, or recognize unfamiliar words.

Together we strengthened the underlying skills needed to read, and we explicitly practiced decoding. Below I share some of the skills we worked on, along with where we will go in the future to support his academic growth.

Strengthen phonological awareness

In order for students to be able to read new words, they have to be able to recognize, hold onto, and manipulate the sounds in spoken words. Activities like segmenting and blending the individual sounds in a given word with physical tiles can help students practice the phonological skills needed to read new words.

I say the word "sun," students repeat the word, and then segment out the sounds s-u-n. Students can identify which vowel sound they hear.

In my Orton-Gillingham lessons, I use phonemic awareness exercises to provide targeted practice with the specific sounds my student's struggle with. For example, I noticed one of my students was consistently misreading the last sound when reading CVC words. Before going directly into a word list, we practiced identifying the last sound in spoken words. Then we practiced changing the last sound.

Students say what the picture shows and then sort by the last sound they hear.

Phonological awareness exercises can also be very helpful when student's are confusing two similar spellings or word parts. I have found this can be very common with students with ADHD. Recently I used a warm up where I had my student select if a spoken word contained ra, like in "grape," or the r-controlled vowel ar like in "park."

I used spoken words like garbage, grand, park, and prance to help the student focus on the difference between r-controlled vowel ar and r in a consonant blend.

Explicitly teach letter sounds

Another foundational skill that students need before being able to read is automatically recognizing letter sounds. While letter name knowledge has it's own place, English is in part a phonetic language, and students must be able to break words into their individual sounds. This summer I worked with a kindergartner who knew the alphabet and how to write his name, but he could not read two letter words. We worked on letter sounds using a multisenosry routine.

We said the letter name, a key word, and a sound as we traced the shape of the letter. When first teaching students letter sounds, once is never enough. We did this drill at the beginning of every lesson, and we also did additional practice. I would lay the letter cards on the table (I started with three at a time). I would take turns saying the letter sound or key word, and the student would grab the card.

"g, goat /g/"

Teach syllable types

A syllable is a word or part of a word that contains a vowel. Where the vowel is positioned in the word helps tell us what sound that vowel makes. Teaching syllable types gives students a framework to predict how to decode many different types of words. As students start reading longer words, knowing the syllable types will help them break multisyllabic words into manageable chunks.

Syllable types:

• closed syllables

• open syllables

• silent e syllables

• r-controlled vowels

• vowel teams

• consonant le

Segmenting and blending

As the foundational skills of decoding strengthen, students will be ready to put them into practice while reading. Even when students know their letter sounds and can break apart the sounds in spoken words, they may need explicit guidance moving these skills to print. It can be helpful to give students visual and tactile reference points for where to start reading a word (as in at the green light) and reminders to pay attention to each letter as they read. Students can tap under each letter as they say that letter sound. Then they can go back and blend those letters together.

Continuous blending

Sometimes students have a hard time actually blending the sounds of a word together. They may be able to segment each sound correctly, but something is lost as they blend those sounds together. They may had additional spaces between the sounds, or substitute a different sound. Continuous blending can be helpful. Instead of segmenting each sound, we can have students hold certain sounds continuously until we move to the next sound.

Syllable division and morphology

Let's put everything together and give students the skills to read longer and longer words! We can build upon all the great strategies shared so far by introducing our students to syllable division and morphology. These are nuanced topics that can't be shared about in this one blog post. However, just know that teaching syllable division and morphology will equip your students to break down multisyllabic words into familiar and manageable chunks, and eventually chunks that have meaning tied to them. If you are at all familiar with the Orton-Gillingham approach, you have probably heard of rabbit division. It's where we teach students to find the two vowels in words that follow the vccv (vowel consonant consonant vowel pattern), then the two consonants inside of those two vowels, and then split the word there. This breaks the word into two closed syllables that students can decode individually and then blend.

This is just one place to start. We want students to be able to recognize multiple syllable patterns in longer words, and eventually affixes as well. Wondering how to teach morphology? Check out this blog post.

Click here to get these same phonics worksheets

Learning to read is not automatic

Reading is not an innate skill, but instead must be taught explicitly. This is especially true for students with dyslexia. Equipping students with phonological awareness skills, letter sound knowledge, and teaching them how to decode words from an early age sets them up to confidently engage with text for the rest of their academic journey.