Is Segmenting Really a Skill?
I don’t have a new Page to add to the Guide on the sidebar today, nor do I have any additions to the word lists I’ve been generating. It does appear, though, that the word lists have generated a fair amount of search engine traffic. I just hope that some of the teachers and parents who find this site via a word list search also take the time to read some of the information regarding vision problems, because if the vision problems were all fixed we probably wouldn’t need the word lists anymore, but that’s a subject for another day.
My purpose in posting today concerns segmenting. Is it a skill, or is it simply knowledge, or factual content, that must be learned?
I think it’s both. I’ve worked with children in my reading practice who do have difficulty segmenting a word like trip. They might think it starts with a /d/ sound (drip) or even a /ch/ sound (chrip) due to their unfamiliarity with the spelling of the words. This unfamiliarity is often accompanied by various speech issues as well, so that they are actually having difficulty pronouncing these words distinctively. At this level, we are seeking to develop a skill, an ability to perform an act.
However, once a child becomes capable of segmenting, it’s still an open question as to whether they can segment the sounds in words efficiently, or at all, for that matter. This gets more to the knowledge issue.
An older child might perform exceptionally poorly on the battery of four Phonics Assessment Tests in the Guide on the sidebar and often that is due to the child having little or no knowledge of the sounds in words. If this is the case, it is usually a trivial matter to improve segmenting ability simply by making it clear what those sounds are.
I recently worked with an older child who simply could not segment. “Dog” was /d/…/og/ and “hat” was /hhaaat/ When I asked how many sounds there were in “hat” the child responded “one.” Now, clearly this was a case of a failure of instruction. To let a child get to middle school and not understand that words are made up of sounds, and yet expect that child to understand how to read, is silly at best, and academic incompetence at worst.
Regardless, after one and one-half lessons I retested the child’s segmenting ability and got a perfect score with one exception. That exception was the word “point” and after asking what the sounds were in “boy” and getting /b/../oy/ in return, I then repeated “point” and got the proper four-sound reply, /p/../oy/../n/../t/. Once a child has progressed to the point where they can segment, it is often a nearly-trivial matter to actually show them how to segment. Don’t assume it will just happen without proper instruction, however.
If you have an older child who struggles with spelling, or with reading generally, at least make sure that the child knows what the sounds are in the words. Too many don’t, in my experience, and the weaker the school’s reading curriculum is, the more this will occur. If you do decide to administer the four Phonics Assessment Tests make sure to start with the Blending Test so that your child will have had the example of you saying individual sounds before you then turn the process around and ask for the specific sounds in words.