OnTrack Reading

In the previous page on multisyllable decoding, I stated a basic rule along with three exceptions. They are repeated below for easy reference.

The rule is:

Stop each chunk after the vowel sound and try the First Vowel Sound.

The three exceptions are:

Add the next sound to the chunk if it is a doubled consonant.

Add the next sound to the chunk if the following chunk is “hard to say“.

I also said that preparation was necessary for your child to understand what you mean when you introduce this rule and its exceptions.

The first bit of preparation is to learn what you mean by the phrase first vowel sound. This is a phrase that has a specific meaning. If you were raised on short and long vowel terminology, I could rephrase the rule as use the short vowel sound. However, this would only work when the vowel sound was spelled with one of the letters, a, e, i, o or u.

On the Page First Vowel Sounds, I’ve posted a worksheet that can be downloaded and that seems to teach children the /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ sounds relatively quickly. It also offers advice on how to introduce your child to the concept of a vowel sound. Here, I’m just going to explain why the terminology first vowel sound is more useful that the old short vowel sound.

First is a concept that means something to your child. Also, he almost certainly learned the /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/ and /u/ sounds first when he was learning to read. Or perhaps I should say he was supposed to learn them first, since many of my clients seem to have trouble recalling them when they start with me.

More important, if you then teach /ae/, /ee/, /ie/, /oe/ and /ue/ as the Second Vowel Sound for the letters a, e, i, o and u, your child will quickly realize that the second vowel sound is just the letter name.

Extending the Concept

Where this becomes even more useful, however, is that this first, second convention leads naturally to third, and even fourth, so that we have a logical way to talk to a six year old about the /o/ sound of the letter a in father, and about the /ee/ sound of the letter i in ski, and the /oo/ sound of the letter o in do and the letter u in truth, as well as the fourth sound of the letter u in push. (Note, by the way, that the traditional short vowel, long vowel instructional language fails to address these third sounds and the occasional fourth sound.)

Furthermore, this convention extends to other vowel spellings which have more than one possible pronunciation. If your child learned ow as the /ow/ sound in cow and then as the /oe/ sound in grow, it is then a trivial matter to refer to /ow/ as the first sound and /oe/ as the second sound of the spelling ow.

Developing a New Strategy

Do you see now where this leads when you tell your child to stop a chunk after the vowel sound and just try the first vowel sound? Say they encounter the word tablet. They say “ta-blet” using first vowel sounds in both chunks, and the word is successfully decoded on the first attempt.

Now let’s say they encounter the word paper. They say “pa-per” using the first vowel sound, /a/. If you’ve got a struggling reader who gets this far in the process, I’ll tell you what he’s likely to do next, assuming he said “pa-per” using the /a/ sound like you’ll be training him to do. He’ll then quickly say something like “pamper.” In other words, he’ll guess, like he’s used to doing because he has not been taught an effective way to deal with multisyllable words.

So, the first thing you have to do is convince him to say “pa-per” (again, using the /a/ sound, not the /ae/ sound, if he doesn’t recognize the word.) Then, and this is very important, instead of guessing, you have to convince him to stop and ask himself if what he’s pronounced is a word. This is crucial. Instead of jumping immediately to a guess, he has to say to himself “Is pa-per a word?”

Once your child has made that shift in strategy you then ask him what the second sound is while pointing at the letter a in the first chunk. If he doesn’t remember, just tell him it’s /ae/ and let him try to decode paper again. At first your child might struggle with this, but in time he will come to see that it’s a reliable way to approach a strange word and begin to trust the strategy. As that process unfolds, he will also begin to actually learn what his choices for first, second, third and even fourth sounds are, because he will be using them regularly.

Some Common Behaviors

Also, don’t be surprised by the following behavior because it’s quite common among children who, for lack of a better strategy, have had to fall back on guessing as their primary decoding strategy. Your child will get through all three steps. He’ll say “pa-per” (using the /a/ sound like you’re teaching him) then jump to “pamper.” Then he’ll finally quit guessing at it and ask himself whether “pa-per” is a word. Then he’ll even try the second vowel sound and you’ll think that he’s finally going to get it because he’s actually saying “pay—-per” with the right sounds. Then he’ll look right up at you and say “paymper.” That’s right, the /m/ sound will jump back into the word. It happens all the time with my clients at the beginning of this process. (By the way, I spelled what he said as paymper so that you would be able to read it quickly, but using the notation I prefer it would be /p/ae/m/-/p/er/.)

Don’t be overly concerned about this if you see it, because such behavior can be changed with consistent guidance. However, it is one reason I call myself a reading therapist instead of a reading tutor. Some children need to have their reading habits completely restructured because they’ve chosen poor strategies (like guessing) and these strategies have become very embedded. With these children you really do have to change the way they deal with print.

Don’t Start Multisyllable Instruction Too Soon

If your child looks at a two-syllable word like “tablet” in the example above and says “ta–ble–t, rather than naturally finishing the second chunk with “blet,” you may have started multisyllable instruction too early. One-syllable instruction in most phonics curricula, including the one used in OnTrack Reading, is focused on breaking words into component sounds (segmenting) and putting them back together again (blending.)

Your child needs to become a capable blender of one-syllable words before pushing him into multisyllable instruction. The OnTrack Reading Advanced Code Workbook presents the chunked word rock–et as the first two-syllable word to be tackled. If a child has not acquired the blending capability to look at the first chunk and just say “rock,” and then at the second and say “et,” but instead says “/r/…/o/…/k/…..rock,” he’s probably not ready for multisyllable instruction.

Once your child becomes comfortable enough with one-syllable words to be able to more or less decode the new ones “on-the-run,” so to speak, he will be more likely to look at the last chunk in a word like tablet and simply say “blet.”

Now that you understand what is meant by try the first vowel sound, the next multisyllable Page will deal with the three exceptions to the main rule.

Next: Multisyllable Decoding-3, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page