Eng Ed 370 – Week 6 Chapter 6 – Nicole Kavajecz – Summer 2021
“Word identification means putting a name or label on words that are encountered in print” (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 152). Terms used to categorize this process of word identification are often used interchangeably, and can include word attack, word analysis, word recognition, and decoding. Children progress through four developmental stages of word identification development. The first stage is the prealphabetic phase or logographic or visual cue phase. Many kinds of environmental print lead to a child understanding and attaching meaning of the ‘word’ to the item. While they might not know each individual letter at this phase, they recognize words such as ‘stop’ on the stop sign, and begin to understand that the word/letters have meaning for the item. The second stage is the partial alphabetic phase and is categorized by the understanding and application of some letters and sounds. The third stage is the full alphabetic phase where children can match all letters and sounds together. They can sound out all letters to form the words. The final stage is the consolidated alphabetic phase where they make more complex connections for patterns in words for more speedy decoding. Teachers must carefully plan lessons for students so these connections are fluid and correct. Students must make guesses, but the teacher should assist whenever possible so those incorrect guesses are not formed into habits (which are difficult to break). Readers develop the ability to segment words into sound units known as onsets (starting sound) and rimes or phonograms (vowel and consonants that follow). Learning these patterns effectively eventually lead readers to being able to sound out multisyllabic words easily.
Approaches and guidelines for teaching phonics are typically categorized into traditional or contemporary (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 156). In both analytic and synthetic traditional approaches, the teacher focuses on letter-sound relationships, where the emphasis is on learning just that instead of meaningful and authentic experience activities. The intensive management is just that: rote memorization of letter-sound relationships. Systematic means phonics introductions are made sequentially and in a logical order. “Key findings from the National Reading Panel (2000) support early, intensive, systematic phonics instruction” (p 157). Analytic phonics or ‘whole-to-part’ is designed that students learn the whole word then the individual sounds. Teachers spend much time on words and less time on the individual sounds, and oral skills are just an introduction before the worksheets. Synthetic phonics teaches the sounds as isolated and individual units. The teacher models the sounds one by one, then works on blending to make words. Syllables are units of sound which contain one vowel sound. Consonants are all sounds represented by the letters of the alphabet except the vowels aeiou and sometimes y. Consonant blends are two or three consecutive letters grouped together but each retains their unique sound, such as /bl/, /sk/, or /scr/. Consonant or vowel digraphs are two or more adjacent letters combine to make a new unique sound, such as /ch/, /ee/, /ea/, nk/, and /ng/. Vowel diphthongs are sounds that blend two vowels to create a separate sound, such as /oi/ in oil or the /oy/ in toy. Consonant influenced vowels happen when the letter a is followed by l, or when any vowel is followed by an r (r-controlled vowels).
The contemporary approaches focus on authentic experiences to learning language(Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 159). Analogy-based phonics instruction happens when a teacher instructs students to decode unfamiliar words by recognizing onset and rimes. Students become familiar with patterns and are provided with context based experiences through text. Embedded phonics instruction can also be described as holistic and meaningful. First, students read a story. Then with the teachers assistance they identify troublesome words and study them within the context of the text. Approaches to teaching phonics should vary in order to provide students with multiple ways to solve the words they will read. Strategies I personally found interesting included the following. Making words could be a game, where onsets and rimes are written on cards in front of students. They then can make different combinations, sound them out, and write them in a journal to keep track of all the different words they can make with the letters provided. Word ladders is another game, but this time students start with a word and either add, subtract, or replace letters as they go along. Poetry is another excellent way a teacher can develop onset and rime functional use, because students are charged with writing something that makes sense as well as uses the same rime at the end of the line.
Meaning and letter-sound relationships are important to develop for students to identify the words they come across(Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 170). Using the cloze procedure, a teacher intentionally deletes words or phrases from the text and the student chooses the best option from a word bank or from their own mind. Gradually the level of difficulty increases, and can be done selectively (specific chosen words are deleted) or systematically (every nth word from the passage is deleted). Semantic gradients are collections of words placed along a continuum. Teachers should teach students strategies to use to to help themselves read more fluently. The cross-checking strategy involves re-reading a sentence or two to make sure you have it correct (confirm-modify, or reject). The self-monitoring strategy develops out of the cross-checking, in that students are more confident every time they read and their oral skills will not be dependent on the teacher’s corrections but on their own ability to determine correctness.
Using the structural analysis of words involves seeing important parts of words such as prefixes, suffixes, and root words (Vacca, Vacca, Gove, Burkey, Lenhart, & McKoen, 2010, p 173). This smallest unit of meaningful sound is referred to as the morpheme. “In the word unhappy, there are two morphemes: un which means not and happy which means joyful” (p 173). Inflected endings are changed based on the tense or degree, but does not effect the meaning. For instance, go or going means the same essentially but used differently for various situations (I was going shopping or I will go shopping). Teachers could employ the use of a word study notebook to help students retain and reference the important prefixes, suffixes, and roots discussed in class. In the early reading stages, identifying high-frequency words (words that appear often in many texts) is essential for teachers so that students commit them to memory quicker. Teachers point out key words as an important aspect of the language-experience approach. These key words connect personal meaning, concepts, and vocabulary with the authentic experiences the students are going through.
Resources
Vacca, J., Vacca, R., Gove, M., Burkey, L., Lenhart, L., & McKoen. (2010). Reading and learning to read. (Tenth Edition). Pearson.
