Word Solving

Helping Kids Decode Unfamiliar Words

When readers are just starting out, they spend a lot of time and effort trying to decode words. This is not an easy task. Turning symbols into sounds and sounds into words involves a lot of guess work. Sometimes, after all that trial and error, readers are left only with errors that try their patience.

Whether the reader is a 5-year-old struggling with his first picture book or a 15-year-old struggling with his second language, I have to provide the same kind of help. I have to show kids logical ways of breaking unfamiliar words into decodable parts they can quickly reassemble into something that makes sense.

As accomplished readers, we swallow words whole. Beginning readers try to do this, too. But many of the words they encounter are unfamiliar to them. When this happens, reading whole words doesn’t work too well. Unfortunately, neither does a random approach to sounding words out. Kids make guesses often based on just one or two letters. In many cases, they may let hard words go entirely, skipping anything they can’t easily figure out.

I don’t want kids spending long periods of time on a single word. But I also don’t want them taking wild guesses or skipping words altogether. Ideally, I’d like kids to make a reasonable attempt to decode all unknown words they encounter through the systematic application of a few simple strategies.

There are many ways to decode unknown words but I want kids to use only a few so they don’t take too much time away from the process of fluent reading. They can use these strategies in any order. Ideally, they’ll move from strategy to strategy very quickly as they puzzle out different parts of a word using different techniques.

Here are the six word solving strategies that I’ve found to be the most helpful:

• Use the first sound. This strategy helps readers make good guesses as long the word they are working with is short. Many single syllable words can be successfully decoded in context using only the first sound. For example, take this sentence: “The boy and his dog ran down the b____.” Reasonable candidates for the last word might be “block” or “beach”. The context supplied by the setting of the story will guide the reader in making the best choice.

• Break off a beginning or an end. Many words start with common prefixes and end with common suffixes. If I teach these in simple spelling and vocabulary lessons, kids will be able to recognize them more easily when they read. Beginnings like “in” or “un” or “re” are easy to figure out. So are endings like “ing” or “er” or “tion”. When readers figure out a meaningful part of a word, the rest of it often pops into their head.

• Look for a word within the word. It’s truly amazing how many words contain other words. For example, the word “within” is made up of “with” and “in”. The word “amazing” contains the words “am” and “zing”. Using words within words often leads to quick solutions.

• Work on the easy parts. Some parts of words are easier to figure out than others. Sp why not start there? Take a word like “university”, for example. It’s easy to pick out three-letter chunks that might help us: “niv”, “ver”, “sit”. Any of these might get us moving in the right direction.

• Use vowel and consonant patterns. The reason some parts of words are easier to figure out than others is because they follow common vowel-consonant patterns. Take the “cvc” pattern, for example. That’s “vowel-consonant-vowel”. We see it in words like “let”, “cat”, “hop”, and “cut”. The great thing about this pattern is that the vowel is almost always short. Another common pattern is “cvvc” or “consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant” which tends to produce long vowel sounds determined by the first vowel as in “team” and “fried”. The last pattern I teach is “vce” or “vowel-consonant-e” which we see in words like “date” and “life”. Vowel sounds are tricky parts of most words and knowing these patterns helps readers begin to sort them out.

• Say the sounds in order. If readers have used the previous strategies to pick out parts of words, they can often finish up their decoding by saying the sounds they hear from left to right in the order in which they occur. Often this produces slightly incorrect pronunciations but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A slightly inaccurate pronunciation can quickly be turned into a correct guess when the reader puts the word back into the context of the sentence and their memory for the correct sounds is jogged.

Using just this small set of strategies, it’s possible for readers to figure out even very complex words. But the process won’t work well if they don’t check their efforts against the sentence in which the challenging word occurs. To make sure kids do this, I teach them a three-step process as follows:

• Reread the sentence with the new word. Whenever readers stop on a hard word, I want them to go back to the capital letter and begin again so they can hear the word in context. That’s the only way to know if their guess is correct.

• Think about what makes sense. If the newly decoded word makes sense in the sentence, it’s probably right. If the word doesn’t make sense, it’s probably wrong, and the reader needs to think about trying another decoding strategy.

• Check the letters in your guess. Often, readers will make their guess based on only a few letters in the word. When they reread the sentence, they may discover that the new word isn’t accurate. But it’s often close. The only way to tell how close is to compare the sound of the word they’ve chosen against the actual letters in the word they’re trying to decode. While it’s hard to get kids to do this, it’s one of the best ways for them to improve their phonemic awareness because it requires them to compare a sequence of sounds in their head with a sequence of letters on the page.

There’s always a tension, it seems, between wanting kids to read fluently and wanting them improve their decoding skills and learn new words. We don’t want them to skip all the hard words to maintain a reasonable reading rate. But we don’t want them to stop reading every time they stumble on something new.

Too often, I think, when faced with these quandaries, we opt for compromise. Maybe if they just stopped for a second or two, or if they let only some of the hard words go by. But compromise in this case seems to produce kids who aren’t good at either maintaining their fluency or decoding new words. And what we really need is for kids to be good at both.

To solve this problem, I use a structured approach to repeated reading. I explain to the kids that good reading involves doing three things all at the same but that when we’re learning, we sometimes have to practice them one at a time.

• Reading to decode. Sometimes the focus of our attention is on letters and sounds as we figure out a new word. We usually have to stop, or at least slow down, in our reading to do this.

• Reading to understand. Once we’ve figured out a new word, we often have to back and read the sentence where we find to the beginning of the sentence where we found it and read again. If all goes well, we’ll read up to the new word, read the new word correctly, and continue to the end of the sentence without too much trouble. Then—and only then in many cases—will we have the information we need to understand the author’s ideas.

• Reading to express. Once we know what all the words are, and we’re read again to figure out what all the words mean, we can read the sentence again to make sure we’re saying the words in the best possible way. This may involve making changes in our voice that make our reading sound more like someone talking.

Read once to decode, once to understand, and once more to express. This three-pass approach insures that kids take the time they need to learn new words in context while at the same time getting the comprehension and fluency practice they need to become better readers. Do kids read everything three times? No. But if I work closely with them, they do it enough so that the benefits of improved decoding, comprehension, and fluency accrue without turning reading into a tedious task.

This may seem like a lot of complicated information to teach kids who can barely read. It is. But it’s still worth teaching because it’s exactly the knowledge they need to get better. Fortunately, they don’t have to learn it all at once, and even if they only use a little of it, it will help them improve their reading immensely.

Think about it this way: if we don’t teach them this information, they’ll be working randomly. As time goes by, they’ll make up their own strategies, many of which will be inefficient or just plain wrong. After a year or two of learning to decode words, every kid will have their own repertoire of strategies anyway. Why not make sure they have a small set of good strategies to begin with?

Getting kids to use these strategies begins with teaching them in short lessons. I tend to do this by putting up words on the board that I’m pretty sure the kids will have to struggle with and then walking them through a variety of approaches to figure the words out.

Most of this I accomplish through thinkalouds. For example, let’s say I’m working with kindergarteners and I put up the word “acrobat”. I might solve that out loud as follows: “ac”, “ro”, “bat”. I’ll say those syllable chunks out loud and then I’ll note the strategies I used like this:

ac = a part that’s easy to figure out
ro = a part that’s easy to figure out
bat = a word within a word

Or take a word like “hippopotamus”:

hip = a word within a word
po = a part that’s easy to figure out
pot = a word within a word
am = a word within a word
us = a word within a word

It’s important to note two things. First, I may solve words differently than the kids do. This means there can be different solutions to the same word. As long the kids can explain their logic, I’m happy to have them take another route. Second, breaking words up into smaller pieces tends to change the way those pieces are pronounced. Specifically, parts of words that are not stressed in normal pronunciation will often become stressed when we break words down. This shift in accent is what often accounts for differences in the way words are pronounced. For example, in the word “hippopotamus”, the “a” has a short “u” sound (the schwa sound) because the stress pattern of the word goes like this: HIP-po-PO-ta-mus. But when I isolate the letters “am” to decode the words, I’m likely to pronounce this like the word “am” which uses the short “a” sound. This is why the final strategy of running the sounds together quickly in the order they occur is often the best way to finish up. This tends to smooth out the individual syllables and restore the natural rhythm—and correct pronunciation—to the word.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take too many practice words with thinkalouds on my part and group attempts at word solving on the kids’ part for everyone to begin getting the hang of it. However, practicing a few words on a few days doesn’t get the job done. As soon as we go over a few strategies, I have to reinforce them in conferences. To do this, I’ll work with kids one-on-one, waiting until they come across an unfamiliar word, and then coaching them through appropriate strategies while they puzzle it out. It’s in the conferencing where the learning really occurs. The lesson is just a way of introducing the techniques I want them to practice. It’s absolutely vital that kids get lots of practice in their own self-selected books. This is the true test because it represents true reading. If the only time kids practice these skills is in workbooks or at the board, they’re unlikely to internalize them as part of their normal reading process.

Finally, to reassure myself that kids are actually using these strategies even when I’m not with them in conferences, I will often ask them to tell me how they figured out a new word. If a kid says, “I don’t know. I just figured it out”, then I know something hasn’t quite clicked. While I can assume the kid is using some set of strategies, I can’t tell which ones. For all I know, the kid could have figured out a word by sheer luck. But when I hear kids describing specific features of a word and the way they used those features to puzzle it out—and I see them using the rereading process I’ve described above to check their efforts—I feel satisfied that they’ve internalized an important set of tools that will improve their reading fluency, allow them to acquire new vocabulary, and increase their enjoyment of reading.