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Sufficient practice is essential for becoming skilled at anything. Learning to read is also a function of appropriate practice. In the beginning, students may need a dozen or more exposures to a new word before they commit it to memory for future recognition and recall. Committing a word to memory, however is impossible unless the internal details of the word - both its sounds and its graphemes - have been explicitly processed.
ACCURATE AND FLUENT WORD RECOGNITION TECHNIQUES
READING WORDS IN LISTS TECHNIQUE
To reinforce the mental habit of using phonic decoding skills, each phonics lesson should provide students with practice reading between 15-30 words containing sound-symbol correspondences that the students have been taught. The teacher points to and guides the blending of the words. Students take turns reading lines of words, chorally, individually, or with a partner.
Word meaning should be invoked during word-reading practice. The teacher can ask, for example:
'Who can find a word that means ___________?'
'Which word has something to do with ____________?'
'I see two words that can describe a slice of cake. What are they?'
If the student misreads a word, the teacher should remind them of the sound-symbol correspondences by pointing to the relevant sound-spelling cards or key-words. Word lists should move from easy to challenging. 'Stretch' words can be tackled at the discretion of the teacher. See below.
(LETRS, Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman)
WORD SORTING TECHNIQUE
There are many ways to sort lists of words. Activities differ by whether they are structured or exploratory (unstructured), and whether the sort is focused on speech sounds, spellings, or word meanings. be sure to know what the purpose of the story really is!
In a closed sort, the teacher tells the students how to sort the words and provides the names of the categories. Closed sorts are more structures than open sorts because all the words will fit into one of the specified categories. During or after the sort, students are asked to state why the words in a group go together. Closed sorts are excellent for guided practice of a concept that has been taught.
Open sorts are open-ended and there more difficult than closed sorts. Not all words necessarily fit into specified categories; some could belong in a 'Doesn't Fit' column. The students must discover ways to group the words, and then explain why they put them in categories. Open sorts are excellent for more advanced students who already understand how to look for an orthographic pattern.
When using word sorts, it is important to e clear whether students should sort words by a sound pattern or a spelling pattern.
Sound sort - (long e sound versus short e sound words): sea, sleep, cheat, bead, meal Vs bread, met, slept, instead, bed
Spelling sort - (vowel teams Vs VCe long vowel spelling pattern): read, cheat, bread, steak, great Vs grate, stake, eke, Pete, mete
(LETRS, Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman)
WORD BUILDING WITH GRAPHEME TILES TECHNIQUE
Activities with manipulative grapheme tiles increase student engagement. Magnetic tiles that can stick to portable whiteboards are ideal.
Using a list of words that contain the correspondences that have been taught, the teacher says a word, models segmentation of its sounds, counts how many grapheme tiles will be needed to spell it, and models spelling it with the tiles. Then the teacher says another word and asks students to build it with their grapheme tiles. Finally, students can try to build more words and share them with a partner.
Word building is a good way to reinforce the idea that some graphemes are used only at the end of words. For example, the activity could be set up like this:
Words and syllables that be built from these elements include bang, buzz, ball, boss, bull, bell, buzz, fang, fall, full, fuss, fell, fill, fizz, jazz, jell, Jess, Jill, Bess, hiss, hang, hung, hall, hill, hull, tell, toss, and tang.
The teacher should immediately give feedback for any errors or confusions. If slowing down and heling students recognise the spelling for a given sound is not sufficient, the teach should model and ask the student(s) to try again. In the process, the teacher can determine which correspondences may need to be taught.
(LETRS, Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman)
WORD CHAIN TECHNIQUE
The purpose of a word chain is to give students practice recognising subtle differences between and among similar-sounding words. Word chains must be carefully preplanned. In early phonics instruction, word chains should show students how to apply sound-symbol correspondences and recognise that words can differ in only one phoneme. Contrasts are easiest to hear in the initial position of a word. The final position is more difficult and the medial position is the most challenging. An example of a chain to focus on short o, with consonants m, p, and t is:
pom, pop, mop, top, Tom
For more challenging instruction, the chain could focus on a progression of minimally contrasting pairs of words - those that differ from each other in only one speech sound, such as these:
gob, cob, cub, cup, cap, gab, bag, bug
One of the attributes that distinguishes the type of word chaining outlined here from the popular 'making words' activity is the careful and preplanned selection of the words in the chain, so that each word differs from the next in only one phoneme-grapheme correspondence that has been previously taught.
Sometimes nonsense words are necessary to make the transitions in the chain. Simply tell the students when the 'word' is a nonsense word or a syllable that is part of a whole word. For example, a word chain to compare /sh/ and /th/ might be as follows:
shin, thin, thimble, shim, sham, mam, mash, math
(LETRS, Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman)
WORD FAMILIES TECHNIQUE
The ability to process larger chunks of words, including rime patterns and common syllables, develops when students have built a repertoire of individual sound-symbol associations and are phonemically aware. To progress beyond single-sound blending, students can practice recognition of onsets and rimes in word families, e.g. bake, cake, make, quake.
Word families are groups of words that share a recurring rime unit, meaning the vowel and what follows in a syllable. Rimes are not 'a sound'; they are usually two or more phonemes combined. For example -est: best, guest, jest, lest, nest, pest, quest, rest, test.
(LETRS, Louisa Moats & Carol Tolman)
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