OnTrack Reading

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.

Hi,

I see that one of your members has posted a link here. I would put this information on your board if I get signed up, but for now it appears the information that is most relevant to your current discussion is a program I’ve written up called the Junior High Phonics Course.

You can get to it from the link above or by scanning down the sidebar of this site. Some of you might also find the information on vision skills interesting. It’s my belief that kids who fail to learn to read in spite of having access to a good phonics program are usually suffering from undiagnosed and untreated vision issues.

I’ve been slow in posting lately as I’ve been trying to get my Advanced Code Workbook restructured as a printable file so I can possibly make it available on-line from an on-demand publisher. It’s been a long project.

The final step in the phonics lesson plan for older students is to add three exceptions to the Main Rule of chunking after each vowel sound, followed by a summation. These Lessons are listed below. They can be accessed from the Table of Contents of the Junior High Phonics Course.

Lesson 7: Exception 1 - Markers
Lesson 8: Exception 2 - Double Consonants
Lesson 9: Exception 3 - “Hard to Say”
Lesson 10: Summing Up

I’ve tried to get all of the necessary steps added to the Junior High Phonics Course as quickly as I could, and as I said earlier, I’ll no doubt be making some changes later. In addition, if you decide that you want to try this with your students, bear in mind that you’ll have to judge for yourself how much additional time to set aside for reviewing the concepts taught earlier in the lessons.

I do believe that the best way to review this information, once you’ve taught it to your class, is to just continue to use it. this is quite easy to do if you introduce new vocabulary in an organized manner as it’s encountered. All you have to do is make sure and write the words on the board, define them, and then chunk them according to the procedures being laid out in the Junior High Phonics Course and your students will then be getting a continuous review of the chunking process that they can then apply to other unfamiliar words they encounter in their content-area reading.

This method is exceptionally effective, and it builds confidence because it is so straightforward and easy to use. Over time you will see your students’ code knowledge increase as well, since you will continually be pointing out the sounds represented by the various letters and digraphs in the vocabulary words.

The word lists containing 2-syllable, 3-syllable and 4-syllable words organized by vowel sounds are done. Today I’ve added the last five PDF files covering the /oul/ (as in could), /oy/, /aw/ and /err/ (as in merry) sounds plus the /u/ sound spelled with the digraph ou. They are all located in the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

I’ll start on the consonant sounds next, and they will come in handy because I need to generate a list of words using the markers ck, tch, dge, dg and x for the Junior High Phonics Course that I’ve started laying out in the Guide.

On another note, I was browsing various websites to see how they handled vowel sounds and I couldn’t help notice how many curricula have been designed which seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading and writing are tools, and not an end in themselves. It appears to me that hours of valuable class time would be wasted if students were being asked to spend time on many of the activities of the sort described on the sites I visited.

I firmly believe that we best learn how to use a tool when we use it for the purpose it was intended. Yes, we need to understand the intricacies of a tool well enough to maintain and use it properly, but we do not need to study the tool itself in depth. We need, instead, to use the tool for the purpose it was intended. When it comes to reading curricula, it almost seems as if we spend more time studying a word and how it is put together, how it looks, how it feels, etc., than we do using the word productively. Words exist to convey meaning, and we need to get right to that as soon as students understand their rudimentary construction.

This is why, I think, the Spalding Method is such an effective language curriculum. It gets to the meat of the matter in a hurry, while overlooking none of the essentials for understanding the tools themselves. But it doesn’t get lost in the tools. Once letters and sounds are understood, and words are constructed based upon them, the curriculum gets down to the business of writing and reading, and in that order, writing before reading. In that way, writing and reading take their rightful place in a child’s mind as a tool for conveying meaning.

But enough of that. The completed word lists organized by the nineteen vowel sounds in the OnTrack Reading curriculum are here on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

I’ve begun to build the Junior High Phonics Course now and have completed the first six lesson plans, which are titled:

Lesson 1: Introducing the Main Rule
Lesson 2: First Vowel Sounds
Lesson 3: Applying the Main Rule
Lesson 4: Learning the Rule of c
Lesson 5: Segmenting and Digraphs
Lesson 6: Testing the Vowel Sound

They can all be accessed from the Page titled Table of Contents.

Each lesson is theoretically structured to last about ten minutes, but these are untested lessons in that regard, so expect surprises on the time requirements. I would appreciate hearing back from anyone who actually attempts teaching this proposed course, so that I can improve on the lesson plans and fine tune the timing.

Also, a warning. I’ve given this all considerable thought and do have substantial experience following essentially what I’m recommending in the one-on-one teaching environment, but I am writing this up in here as a first draft effort and I will likely make structural changes if I realize I missed something along the way that needs to be covered. In other words, these lesson plans will probably change over the next month or so until I get everything sorted out properly.

As one example, it occurs to me that many older students are terrible segmenters. In other words, they can’t accurately tell you the component sounds in a word. Segmenting is easily taught, especially to older students, but it does need to be a step in the process somewhere along the line, and not too far into the lesson plans either.

So, keeping these cautionary words in mind, take a look at the additions to the Junior High Phonics Course by going to the Table of Contents.

The Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable now has word lists added in the form of PDF files for the /ue/ and /oo/ vowel sounds, leaving only a few sounds to go.

I’ve also been spending time building the information on the Junior High Phonics Course that I described in yesterday’s post, but I’ll add a separate daily post to cover that later today.

Just to illustrate a use for the vowel sound word lists I’ve been adding to the site over the last few weeks, I’m now using them to pick out words that are suitable for use at various stages in the Junior High Phonics Course. Because the word lists are organized by basic code consonant spellings first and then advanced code consonant spellings, it is easy to find words that are decodable using only the Main Rule that I’ve introduced so far.

What would be a formidable task of finding several dozen multisyllable words to use that contain only basic code consonant spellings and vowel spellings was made simple just by examining words on the first five word lists covering the /a/e/i/o/u/ sounds.

All of the vowel sound lists are on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

Today marks the start of the posting of the Junior High Phonics Course to the Guide located on the Sidebar. It’s located well down the list below Tidbits.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to lay out a junior high (or high school) phonics curriculum that flows naturally from the OnTrack Reading curriculum and which could be used by teachers in any content area to polish up the phonics skills of their weaker readers. One comment I hear consistently from teachers is a frustration over the inability of their weaker readers to handle the content area reading required to learn the subject matter they are trying to teach.

I believe that the strongest element of the OnTrack Reading curriculum is the approach that I’ve developed to explain the decoding of unfamiliar multisyllable words to struggling readers. Most junior high and high school students who struggle with reading have developed rudimentary reading skills by that time and have become comfortable with frequently encountered words. The problem is that they have no secure strategy for approaching longer, more complex word and so they just guess, usually by picking a word from their listening vocabulary that has structural similarities to the unfamiliar word on the page. This strategy makes it almost impossible for them to read unfamiliar science, math and social studies terms they encounter in their reading, because they are not in their listening vocabulary yet.

What I am calling the OnTrack Junior High Phonics Course will be described in a series of lesson plans over the next few weeks (if all goes as planned.) So far, all that has been completed is the introductory Page at Junior High Phonics Course.

The Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable now has two more lists. These cover spelling alternatives for two of the basic vowel sounds, the /e/ sound and the /o/ sound.

The /e/ sound has two alternatives, the digraph ea in head and the digraph ai in words like said and captain. The first alternative needs to be taught as an /e/ sound, but I prefer to tell my clients to think of the digraph ai as an /ae/ sound throughout because it will help them spell words like captain and fountain. The word said then becomes a special case to be memorized, but it’s so commonly used that this is relatively easy to accomplish.

In the case of the /o/ sound, the spelling alternative is the letter a as in the words want and father. However, in the OnTrack Reading curriculum, hundreds of words which are pronounced with the schwa sound (an /u/ sound) are more or less forced into an /o/ pronunciation spelled with the letter a.

Clients are then encouraged to pronounce words like ago, away and around with leading /o/ sounds, rather than /u/ for spelling purposes. This is also done with words like miracle and paragraph where the middle chunk is a schwa sound. Children are better off saying a clear /o/ sound for those chunks and then need to remember that the letter a is used for spelling it. After a time, many consistent patterns emerge, as can be seen on examining the word list.

Also, the letter a, when followed by one or two l’s (as in also and taller) often takes on the /o/ sound, though it might also follow the patterns of most letter combinations and take on the First Vowel Sound, /a/, as in alcohol and alley. Clients are encouraged to chunk according to the exceptions, getting al-co-hol and al-so, as well as all-ey and tall-er, and then try the First Vowel Sound, /a/, before trying the /o/ sound.

The list of multisyllable words organized by vowel sound is over half complete now, with the /ue/, /oo/, /oul/, /u/ complex next to be entered. The end is in sight, and then we’ll take a different tack for a while.

Again, here’s the location of the new lists: Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

The Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable now has the /ae/ sound list added to it, again in the form of a PDF file that can be downloaded. This list is close to 500 word long, and is organized like the other lists.

I think (hope) the number of words will become more manageable for the rest of the vowel sounds yet to be covered, but we’ll see.

Here’s a little side note about the notation I use for the /ae/ sound (the vowel sound in name, play and sleigh.) I chose it because of the parallel to /ee/, /ie/, /oe/ and /ue/ which represent the other “long” vowel sounds. In the case of those four choices, words can easily be found which use those particular spellings, like, for example, bee, lie, toe and cue.

Well, about the only examples I could honestly come up with for the long-a being spelled ae were names like Mae and Rae, but I liked the parallel with the others, and also the parallel to the a-e spelling.

Then someone comes on a website discussion and asks why I chose a symbol for the long-a sound that usually represents the /ee/ sound. Turns out that besides the word algae, there are several pretty arcane words that do use the ae spelling for /ee/, but you really have to dig to find them. So I figured Mae West was better known than algae and it’s compatriots and stayed with the symbol ae for the long-a sound. Besides, I also have a relative named Jae.

The things we spend time thinking about when we dig into the English language. Sheesh!

I’ve added two different PDF files for the /ee/ sound to the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

But even with two lists, I don’t come close to listing all the words in the database containing the /ee/ sound. That is because hundreds of words either have the letter e representing the /ee/ sound in a syllable or else end with the letter y representing the /ee/ sound.

So, I just left those two spellings of /ee/ off of the lists, figuring that no one would have that hard a time thinking of some examples. The two /ee/ lists consist of one list that has all of the words in the database where the letter i stands for the /ee/ sound, and one list which contains these six spellings of the /ee/ sound (ee, ea, e-e, ey, ei, ie.) Together the two lists contain about 350 multisyllable words.