Reading Is Good

Decoding is the act of systematically turning written words into spoken words by matching written letter or letter-clusters to oral sounds. Students must be able to decode unknown words while reading. There are several different ways to do this: letter-by-letter (phoneme) decoding, pattern decoding, and decoding by analogy. Although all three are powerful skills, none of them comes “naturally.” Decoding must be directly taught in order for students to learn how to read.

Letter-By-Letter (Phoneme) Decoding

The earliest decoding skill is a letter-by-letter approach. Starting at the left side of a word and moving one letter at a time to the right, the student makes the associated letter-sounds and then blends them together. This approach works very well for simple words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog,’ but loses effectiveness with more complicated words like ‘home,’ ‘rain,’ and ‘night.’

What To Do

The key to success with letter-by-letter decoding is a robust knowledge of letter-sounds. The more letter sounds a child knows, the more sounds in a word they will be able to translate. Until letter-sound knowledge is in place, decoding cannot move forward. See the article on Phonics for more on teaching letter-sound correspondences.

Once students know all or most of the letter-sounds, they need to be able to blend those sounds together to form coherent words. Elkonin Boxes are one time-tested and research-based practice for helping kids blend sounds.

Pattern Decoding

Consider the word ‘home.’ A letter-by-letter decoding of this word results in a pretty odd pronunciation — /h/ /ah/ /m/ /eh/. In order to correctly decode this word, students must have and apply a knowledge of the silent e pattern, which makes the O ’say its name.’ Similarly, students must know that ‘ai’ makes a long a sound in order to read the word ‘rain’ and that ‘igh’ makes a long i sound in order to read ‘night.’

In other words, when the letter-by-letter approach begins to fail, students learn to look for letter patterns that represent sounds. We sometimes refer to these patterns as chunks, and the act of decoding by pattern as ‘chunking a word.’

What To Do

Just as letter-by-letter decoding relies on knowledge of letter-sounds, pattern decoding relies on knowledge of letter-clusters and patterns and the associated sounds. These relationships are taught in the same way as individual letter sounds. It’s simply a question of telling students that ‘ai’ makes a long a sound and exposing them to lots of examples that prove it. Word sorts are a great way to foster this knowledge by challenging students to discover those relationships on their own.

It’s also important to teach students about ‘chunking words.’ Kids have a hard time with this until they are shown ways to spot and isolate patterns. One easy way to teach this is to show kids how to use their fingers to cover up parts of words as they examine them.

Teach students to look for and isolate ‘chunks’ in words. In the word ‘rain,’ for instance (see right), students can recognize the ‘r’ by itself, the ‘ai’ together as a pattern that makes the long A sound, and the ‘n’ by itself. The student will say /r/ /A/ /n/. Notice how using the finger to chunk the word isolates each part as needed.

Decoding by Analogy

A third way that students decode words is by relating what they see in a new word to words they already know that are similar. For instance, if you know the word ‘pain’ by sight, you can use that knowledge to figure out the word ‘rain’ (they both end with the same letter pattern so it’s fair to assume they both end with the same sound as well).

What To Do

Researchers who have focused on decoding by analogy usually start by selecting a single key word for each chunk they want to help students decode. For instance, they might use the word ‘dog’ for the ‘og’ chunk; ‘cat’ for the ‘at’ chunk; ‘pain’ for the ‘ain’ chunk. Once students have been taught these key words, they are encouraged to use them by looking for patterns in a new word and comparing them against the store of key words in their heads.

A student decoding a new word would engage in an inner dialog something like this: ‘I see r - a - i - n. I recognize ‘ain’ from the word ‘pain.’ In the word ‘pain,’ the ‘ain’ says /An/, so I’ll try an /An/ sound for the ‘ain’ in this new word. /r/ /An/, rain. That makes sense.’

Once word knowledge has reached a certain point, most students will do a little decoding by analogy on their own. This is especially true once word families have been taught in first and second grades. As a teaching method, decoding by analogy is usually used to help students tackle multi-syllabic words, such as ‘refrain’ or ‘contain’ where referring to key words can help break the task into smaller pieces. However, since the human brain tends to think in comparisons, showing even young students how to decode by analogy can be helpful.