OnTrack Reading

A few years back, someone posted a comment about verbal syllables on a website that I found interesting. Apparently linguists recognize that a natural break in spoken syllables normally occurs immediately after the vowel sound. I took that comment and developed a multisyllable decoding method around it. I’ve used that method with nearly 100 clients since then, fine-tuning it as I went, and it works exceptionally well.

Where most multisyllable instruction goes awry is in adopting the written syllables as defined in the dictionary. The first casualty to commonsense was the decision to break syllables in words like rabbit and common between the doubled consonants, resulting in rab-bit and com-mon. In fact, there is only one /b/ sound in rabbit and one /m/ sound in common, though adults trained to break the syllables in the middle of the sound probably think they hear two.

The second casualty was the decision to assume that a young child knows implicitly whether a syllable is closed or open. (A closed syllable has a consonant sound following the vowel sound, whereas an open syllable ends with the vowel sound.) Curriculum writers expect a child to know that “vapor” is broken in two as va-por but that rabid is rab-id. They then go on to explain that closed syllables carry short vowel sounds and open syllables carry long vowel sounds. Left unexplained is how to determine whether to close any particular syllable or leave it open as well as what to do about words like father (fa-ther) where the vowel sound is neither long nor short. Needless to say, such approaches confuse first graders.

In fact, the natural break in the spoken words, using the above examples, is after the vowel sound in each case (ra-bbit, co-mmon, va-por, ra-bid and fa-ther.) To convince yourself of this, just read the five words out loud, pausing very briefly at each break as indicated. Do this two or three times to feel the natural cadence. Now read these dictionary defined breaks (rab-bit, com-mon, va-por, rab-id, fa-ther.) Notice how awkward it is to pause on three of the examples now? This is because the natural spoken syllable break is after the vowel sound.

One important exception occurs, however. When the next spoken syllable would have to begin with an awkward blend, then one or even two consonant sounds are tacked on naturally to the preceding syllable. Thus, constantly is broken in spoken syllables not as co-nsta-ntly, but rather as con-stant-ly because nst is not a permitted blend in English. Nor are ntl, nor tl, so both the n and the t have to be moved to the preceding spoken syllable.

These breaks happen quite naturally in spoken syllables because only a certain limited number of consonant combinations are used to begin English words, and this limitation extends to the internal syllables as well. Any child, completely unaware of any syllable rules, will tend to naturally chunk constantly as con-stant-ly once he knows what you mean by asking him to break the word up into chunks. Orally, co-nsta-ntly will never occur to him, nor will con-stan-tly.

Chunks

For instructional purposes, it wouldn’t do to redefine the word syllable for each child, since the dictionary is pretty much gospel when it comes to print. And we are talking about spoken syllables anyway, so the way to handle it is to define a new word that means chunks of sound, and that word in both Reading Reflex and my curriculum is just chunk. I explain that longer words are composed of chunks, illustrate the concept both orally and visually, and then mention that if they ever take a syllable test and use chunks instead they will fail it.

My clients are taught that longer words are composed of several chunks and that each chunk has exactly one vowel sound in it. This is the one thing chunks and syllables have in common; each has exactly one vowel sound, so a five syllable word will have five vowels and it will be divisible into five chunks.

Multisyllable Decoding in a Nutshell

With proper preparation, a young child can be taught to decode the vast majority of multisyllable words within his listening vocabulary by applying one rule and learning three exceptions to the rule.

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“.

Note that I emphasized with proper preparation. For instance, they have to be taught first that the markers are ck, tch, x and dg. They also have to be taught a successful strategy for testing different options if their first attempt doesn’t yield a recognizable word. I’ll go into the preparation and strategy in more detail on the next page. For now, let me just say that in my experience first and second graders can easily learn to apply the main rule and then to apply the exceptions, and as they do so, their confidence in their ability to decode longer words grows while their tendency to guess at them diminishes.

Next: Multisyllable Decoding-2, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page