OnTrack Reading

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.

I’ve now loaded the multisyllable word list for the /ie/ sound onto the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable. Like the others, it’s a PDF file that can be downloaded for viewing or printing. It runs about 700 words, and that’s getting to be a problem, because it looks like the /ee/ list is going to run over 1,000 words.

I’m not sure how I’ll resolve this yet. I might break the lists that have over 250 to 300 words down into sublists by spellings of the target sound. With the smaller lists, it’s fairly easy to just go through the list and find all of the cases of a particular spelling, for example the ou spelling of the /ow/ sound. It gets a little tougher, okay, a lot tougher, when there’s 500 to 1,000 words, even if they are broken into a few subcategories.

For now, here’s where the /ie/ list is of multisyllable words is located: Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

The /oe/ and /er/ multisyllable word lists have been added to the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable today.

Hopefully, the /er/ sound will be the longest and it will tail off from here. The PDF file runs to nine pages and about 900 words. If the some of the other sounds get that lengthy, I may have to change the layout some, but /er/ is a popular sound in words, so we’ll see what happens next with /ie/, /ee/ and /ae/ sounds.

Again, check out Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable for the new additions.

If you go to the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable you will find six more word lists added.

The first five PDF files now cover the Basic Code vowel sounds, with a couple of quirks. Because the database is coded on the basis of perfect pronunciation, meaning that schwas were generally represented by a sound that reflects the actual spelling, the number of words in the database containing, say, an /i/ sound would number close to a thousand.

Because it’s not obvious how useful such a list would even be, I decided to limit the words in the first five lists to just those that are composed only of the Basic Code vowel spellings, a, e, i, o and u. Furthermore, I established a hierarchy of sorts to further limit the lists. If a word has two, three or four different Basic Code vowel sounds, it appears in the list numbered with it’s highest vowel sound. Thus, hundred appears in the list #5, the /u/ sound, but not list #2, the /e/ sound. This means that list #1 contains multisyllable words with only the /a/ sound, so it is very short.

However, if you look at the the Advanced Code sound added, list #8, the /ow/ sound, you will find every multisyllable word in the database which contains an /ow/ sound. You will also find all of the /ow/ words broken into several sub-lists so that words containing only simple (Basic Code) consonant spellings can be picked out, or words containing only vowel sounds that have already been covered in the OnTrack Reading curriculum sequence have been covered. Depending on your purpose, this could be quite useful, I suspect.

Anyway, I’ll be adding to the list over the next few days, but right now the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable has lists of the first eight sounds.

The list of multisyllable words containing the /or/ sound has been loaded onto the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

It looks like it’s about a two-hour project to do each vowel sound, so these will probably be slow in coming, especially if some of the word lists turn out to be a lot more lengthy, which is likely. The plan is to progress through the multisyllable words containing each particular vowel sound and then switch to consonant sound spellings, but I might start to alternate back and forth at some point.

If anyone has a particular vowel sound that you’re looking for a list on, leave a comment and I’ll try to get it done next. Ditto for consonant sound spellings. I’m not sure all this word list information is worthwhile, but the database I have makes it relatively easy to organize, so I’ll try to stay with it.

By the way, I’m finishing up with another client who is just taking off in decoding multisyllable words by doing it the way I describe in Multisyllable Decoding - 1. The words on all the word lists are broken into chunks following the Rule and the Three Exceptions. You’ve got to see how easy this is for struggling readers to really appreciate it, I think, especially if the chunk boundaries grate on your nerves due to prior training. I know they did on mine, but it works.

Again, the new /or/ sound list is at Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.

Today, I’ve started working on the Page Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable. These lists will be trickier to generate and harder to input, so the process of getting them on here will probably take longer than the one-syllable lists did.

You might find these lists useful for various purposes even if you don’t ever use the OnTrack Reading curriculum’s vowel sequencing. For those who do use the same vowel sequencing, the lists should be an extremely good resource for lists of words that can be used in writing stories and for reviewing sounds already covered earlier.

The first addition is a PDF file of all of the multisyllable words containing the /ar/ sound in at least one syllable of the word. You can find it at Vowel Sounds - Multisyllable.