Fails to demonstrate word attack skills

Children with dyslexia have extraordinary difficulty in using word attack skills to read new words as well as trouble committing decoded words to memory.

Strategies and Accommodations:

1. Auditory Awareness of Syllables: The following activities promote awareness of syllables in words.

• Syllable awareness begins early, with students identifying or generating short words (farm, feet, fat, fork, food) and long words (February, firefighter, fisherman). The chosen words might begin with a certain sound or pertain to a particular unit of study (plants, animals, ocean, United States)
• Students repeat words dictated by the teacher. They clap or tap out the number of syllables. The teacher starts with compound words (playground, flashlight, cowboy), then moves on to two-syllable words (velvet, plastic, mascot) and then on to words with three or more syllables (fantastic, investment, invitation).
• Students repeat words dictated by the teacher and move a counter (e.g., block, button, penny) for each syllable they hear. The use of the counters provides a visual and kinesthetic anchor for the sounds.
• Students repeat a word with two or more syllables dictated by the teacher. Students are asked to repeat the word again, omitting a designated syllable as illustrated in the following dialogue:

Teacher: Say “transportation”

Students: Transportation

Teacher: Say “transportation” without “trans”

Students: Portation

Teacher: Say “transportation” without “tion” (sh) (u) (n)

Students: Transporta

This activity is effective in helping students with the correct pronunciations of words and becomes important reinforcement for reading and spelling words of more than one syllable.

2. Six Types of Syllables:

A complicating factor in learning the sound-symbol correspondence of written English is the instability of the vowels - they have more than one sound. Knowledge of syllable types is an important organizing tool for decoding unknown words. Students can group letters into known syllable types that give clues about the sounds of the vowels. There are six orthographic types of syllables.

a. Closed Syllable (it, bed, and, lost)

b. Open Syllable (no, me, she, we, he)

c. Vowel-Consonant-e Syllable (name, five, slope, these)

d. Vowel-Pair(Vowel Team) Syllable (each, boil, sweet, tray)

e. Vowel-r (R-Controlled) Syllable (fern, burn, thirst, star, bird, dollar, doctor)

f. Consonant-le (Final Stable) Syllable (-dle, -fle, -gle-, -ple, -age, -sion, -tion, -ture)

A high percentage of the more than 600,000 words of English can be categorized as one of these syllable types or as a composite of different syllable types.

3. Morphology

The study of morphemes not only provides a springboard for vocabulary development and spelling and bridges the gap between alphabetic reading and comprehension.

Multisensory Introduction of Affixes

Quite often the means to reading multisyllabic words is identifying affixes that are part of the word. Students may be able to recognize an unfamiliar word simply by identifying the affixes and then the remaining base word or root. Affixes can be introduced using a multisensory guided discovery approach:

• The teacher reads a list of five or six derivatives that have a common trait as students repeat each word (e.g., joyful, careful, helpful, graceful, cheerful).
• Students discover what sounds the same in each word.
• The teacher writes the derivatives on the board.
• Students discover which letters are the same in each word and where the letters are found.
• Students discover whether the same letters (the affix) are a suffix or a prefix, and they discover the meaning of the affix.
• Students verbalize what they have discovered (e.g., -ful is a consonant suffix that means full of).
• The teacher writes the new affix on an index card and adds it to an affix deck that is systematically reviewed. During review, students identify and spell the affix, give a key word, give the pronunciation, and give the meaning of the affix (e.g., when looking at the affix cared for suffix –ful, students say, “Consonant suffix f-u-l, hopeful, /ful/, full of “).

The four most frequent prefixes - 58% of prefixed words in English

Dis- opposite

In-, im-, il-, ir- not

Re- again

Un- not

The four most common suffixes - 72% of suffixed words in English

-ed past tense verb

-ing verb form

-ly characteristic of

-s, -es more than one

Syllable Division

Skilled readers are able to sense where to divide longer words because they have an awareness of syllables and internalized the orthographic patters of the language. The following activities heighten students’ visual awareness of syllables and syllable division patterns.

• Separated Syllables

Students identify syllable types of separated syllables, join them into words, and read the words aloud:

Cac/tus mas/cot ban/dit nut/meg

Mag/net gob/let prob/lem nap/kin

• Manipulation of Multisyllabic words

Students identify syllables written on individual cards, arrange them into words, and read the words aloud.

• iii. Scooping the Syllables

As students read multisyllabic words on a worksheet, they call attention to the syllables in the words by scooping the syllables. Using a pencil, students “scoop” (i.e., draw an arc underneath) the syllables from left to right, identify the syllable type, place a syllable code under each syllable (e.g., o for open, r for r-controlled) and code the vowel.

• iv. Common Patterns for Dividing Words into Syllables

There are four major patterns in English that indicate that a word will be divided into syllables according to how it is pronounced:

• VCCV-Two Consonants between two vowels
  • VC`/CV, VC/CV`, V`/CC\
• VCV-One Consonant between two vowels
  • V`/CV, V/CV`, VC`/C
• VCCCV-Three Consonants Between Two Vowels
  • VC`/CCV, VC/CCV`, VVC`/CV
• VV-Two Adjacent Vowels
  • V`/V, V/V`

4. Procedure for Dividing Words

A structured procedure provides readers with a systematic approach for reading long, unfamiliar words and builds an orthographic memory for syllable-division patterns. Dyslexic students may need additional visual and kinesthetic information to build the memory of these patterns.

1. Touch the vowels: Using the index fingers of both hands, students touch the sounded vowels or vowel pairs and identify them.
2. Count the consonants: Students count the number of consonants between the two vowels or vowel pairs and identify the division pattern.
3. Code: Students identify each syllable type and code the vowels accordingly.
4. Read: Students reach each syllable without accenting either syllable.
5. Read again: Students read the syllables together with the appropriate accent.
6. Adjust: Students adjust the accent or division of the word is not recognizable. Adjusting the accent or the division to produce a recognizable word teaches students to be flexible with language.

5. Programs for Multisyllabic Word Reading

• Decoding Multisyllabic Words (www.scholastic.com)
• Glass Analysis (www.glassanalysis.com)
• Mega-words (www.epsbooks.com)
• Patterns for Success in Reading and Spelling (www.proedinc.com)
• WORDS (www.proedinc.com)
• REWARDS (www.rewardsreading.com)

6. Websites with Information on Basic Reading Skills

• Cambridge Online Dictionary (http://dictionary.cambridge.org)
• Dolch Sight Words (www.createdby teachers.com)
• Read Well (www.readwell.net)
• Starfall (www.Starfall.com)
• Vaughn Gross Center for Reading and Language Arts (www.texasreading.org)