decoding "initiate" by PG

There isn’t. I have found that there are orthographic exceptions to sounds, due to how our mouth works when certain sounds follow other sounds, I don’t know, but the combinations listed in are the most used ones. Also, as I said, when the child gets to that point in PG, the brain is working and it doesn’t matter that he would say /in/i/tae/ate, because they just naturally change it to the right word. After all, that is what good readers do, isn’t it?

not only does /t/ represent /sh/ but in words like /intellectual/ it represents the /ch/

i had a kid in for testing last night, he is in 6th grade, had ZERO idea what to do with that word

he had / in tlect/ and after that he was lost in what i call “code hell”,

no strategy what so ever for the MS and even though he can read the word /future/ and handle the /t/

that piece of code did not translate to the word /intellectual/

if these older kids cannot put familar code into unknown words, vocabulary growth stagnates

he also said /candoor/ for /candor/, somewhere some teacher told him /or/ was or as in for and never addressed the decoding of those two sounds /o-e/ and /r/

the code becomes a mountain for kids who struggle to remember it,

i see this as the most difficult part of remediation, and i do wish this area would be addressed in the research, RAVE-O is attempting to speak this issue but i do not know much about it,

for these kids, seeing code is not enough, had a parent call last night, her son is in 6th grade reading on a 1st grade level,

she said he cannot remember any code, apparently so, how to get code in front of him and not make it more of chore than it already is??

how to get them to practice at this late age, i will see him one hour a week, he is doing almost nothing in his middle school, school has given up
libby

Hi Ewa,

I agree with Shay that PGx is set up to expose kids to “most” of the spellings, leaving them to figure out the rest, and that this will work in most cases.

However, I part company with them on whether to teach several ways to spell the “sh” sound. Another method, Spalding, teaches “ti” “si” and “ci” as phonograms (that’s their term for a digraph) for the /sh/ sound.

While this can cause some confusion the first time they run into a word like “practice” (prac-sh???) there are literally thousands of words where this knowledge comes in handy, so I teach it, along with “ssi” also.

Here are a few words to illustrate it:

ci: spe ci al, su spi ci on, co er ci on, pre ci ous
ti: par ti al, pa ti ent, pa la ti al, ra ti o
si/ssi: ten si on, pen si on, mi ssi on, pa ssi on

As for “ti” being the “shee” sounds, it’s a relatively easy transfer from sh to shee. In fact, my dictionary has two pronunciations for “ratio” ray sho and ray she o, as people use both. Similarly, it’s a very short step from “in ee shate” to “in.ee she ate” as you will see when you try it. What I do is very consistent with the underlying concept of the program, and replaces their section on “special endings” which is then not needed…..Rod

Rod,
I actually bought the “Writing Road to Reading” (?) by Spalding and I really liked it. It helped me a lot!!!

This approach reminds me very much of how we learned reading back home and I can only wonder why there was ever an idea introduced that “guessing” a word is fine when teaching reading to 1st graders? This does so much harm (and it is really hard to “undo”), not only b/c it is ineffective, but also it implements an idea that there is little order that can be used to decode words and one needs to memorize them.

I would also prefer that my son is explicitly told that “ti” “ssi/si” and “ci” can represent a “sh” sound, because “leaving this to him to figure out” might (or might not) work.

I do not know whether anybody will like to leave the children to discover some concept taught in Math (for example reading a time lapses from an analog clock) because some of them will figure this out?

But this brings us back where we were- that teaching only a part of what needs to be taught might work for some, but might not for others- some of them just need to be told explicitly even if it means teaching more “rules”. Just a “mom” opinion…

Do you have any other additions to PG you could share? I have come across a few but feel like I am doing it by the seat of my pants. For example, “ar” as in far and the short u sound as in from, brother.

My son is not one to figure things out either!!!

Beth

Beth,
I’m in the same boat as you. My son has an easier time with the more common forms, but when we get to the more uncommon (non-PG) sound symbols he gets lost.

Like you, we’ve gone over “ar” and some others, but I’ve thought it would be nice if I could find lists of similar less common sound symbols (often the problem seems to be vowel teams) so I can create some flash cards and help my son to recognize them.

He cannot figure them out on his own and needs lots of repetition to make the sound/symbol connection.

I was curious if the Seeing Stars decoding workbooks might have something like this. Or maybe Spalding does? I’m not familiar with Spalding, but I’d be interested in learning more about it.

Hi Beth

First, don’t teach “al” in “wall” or “talk” as a digraph. Rather, point out that “lk” is a spelling of /k/ in talk, walk, chalk, caulk, yolk, Polk, and ??? It’s true that an “a” in front of an /l/ sound usually represents an /o/ or /aw/ sound depending on where you live, but splitting a “ll” in wall, tall and fall is confusing and contradictory when you’re also trying to convince them that the bb in rabbit is not to be split. Besides, “al” isn’t always /o/ or /aw/….Alvin, Alcatraz, allocate, etc. This was a silly idea, and if they ever rewrite the book, I hope they dump it, frankly.

The more important change I would make, however, is regarding the “wh” digraph. I think kids should learn it’s proper pronunciation in first grade as it would clear up a lot of reading confusion. Instead we set up words like when, where, why, who and whose as sight words because kids can’t figure out when they start with a /w/ sound and when they start with a /h/ sound. Then they also start mixing them up with words like then, there, this, these, those and how because they don’t have a good phonetic base for “wh”

I tell kids two things. I write down “hwen” and “hwere” and tell them that years ago we used to reverse the order of the letters in “when” and “where” and other words beginning with “wh.” Then I tell them that “wh” (hw) stands for the sound you make when blowing out a candle. The important part of this is the pursing of the lips you end up with as you blow compared to where they are when saying /h/ or /w/.

Then I get them to say words like when, where, whale and whistle correctly, emphasizing the /hw/ sound. Finally, and here’s the payoff in all this, I have them make the same sound as they start the words who, whom, whose and whole. It’s just a touch awkward at first when you try it, but it’s really possible to get a different feel to your mouth when you say hole versus whole (your lips end up pursed at the beginning of whole.)

I’m entirely convinced that every first grade teacher who teaches sh/ch/th should also be teaching /hw/. It would probably be fun because of the candle blowing part and most of the kids would probably remember the weird part about reversing the spelling sometime in the past. Instead, I’m pretty sure they go on the dreaded “sight word” list in a lot of classrooms. The “wh” words are extremely common, and they are phonetically spelled for the most part, and they need to be taught that way. They are among the most misread words in English by poor readers, I would guess, and the above approach would probably correct the situation…..Rod

“I actually bought the “Writing Road to Reading” (?) by Spalding and I really liked it. It helped me a lot!!!”

Hi Ewa,

I think every first/second grade teacher should read it….it’s a great book that gets better with re-reading after some experience. I’ve often wondered about her many comments on “avoiding a tendency toward dyslexia.”

I also find her handwriting instructions very good and use them whenever a kid has particularly bad letter formation.

However, the particular instructions in the book are not very suitable for use in a tutoring situation, I feel, because it would take much too long to cover all the groundwork. It’s an initial teaching method, not a remedial method, unless you have a lot of time and are basically starting over with a kid….

As an initial teaching method, however, I think it may be one of the best ever designed. It’s easy to read the book now and scoff at what she says is possible, but I had a teacher tell me recently that she was amazed at how easily a first grade class learned 54 phonograms in the prescribed first three weeks of school. It makes me wonder whether the story in the book about the first grade teacher dividing the class into two groups, one needing more help and the other reading on their own. The smaller group was 18 kids and the larger one was 36….54 kids in the class, all learning to read, apparently.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be a lot of Spalding classes out there anymore. I would love to speak with more teachers who use the method today. I’m particularly interested in whether they see the number of LD cases in a Spalding classroom that the average teacher today seems to encounter. The reason I wonder about this is that I think the LD cases are dominated by kids with binocular vision problems, and I think Spalding does her best to see that proper visual skills are developed along with the reading/writing/spelling skills.

Rod

Rod wrote:
>
> Hi Beth
>
> First, don’t teach “al” in “wall” or “talk” as a digraph.
> Rather, point out that “lk” is a spelling of /k/ in talk,
> walk, chalk, caulk, yolk, Polk, and ??? It’s true that an
> “a” in front of an /l/ sound usually represents an /o/ or
> /aw/ sound depending on where you live, but splitting a “ll”
> in wall, tall and fall is confusing and contradictory when
> you’re also trying to convince them that the bb in rabbit is
> not to be split. Besides, “al” isn’t always /o/ or
> /aw/….Alvin, Alcatraz, allocate, etc. This was a silly
> idea, and if they ever rewrite the book, I hope they dump it,
> frankly.
>

Wilson introduces “all” as in ball, all, call, fall teaching that it is an exception of a short “a” sound when a is followed by “ll”.

This would leave reading Alvin, Alcatraz as it shodul be read (the allocate will be problem, but… for a 3-grader this si less likely to be a problem than reading “ball” or “wall”.
Any comments on that?

Because of the nature of English spelling we cannot, via any method, teach decoding in every case. I have noted that as we move to three and 4, even 5 syllable words, the frequency with which we encounter syllables that do NOT follow the patterns becomes greater and greater. Stressed and unstressed syllables cause the difficulty.

It is so important to build the speaking/listening vocabulary to begin to account for this confusion. This IS where the notion of using the context plus SOME letter/sound cues becomes a requirement. Unlike the misunderstanding that was common a few years back that we should use context most heavily. In truth, good readers will probably use the fewest number of cues they can get by on to decode and make sense of the unknown word. W/o attention to meaning these students who do learn the advanced code pretty well have more difficulties.

Great example, on the Woodcock Johnson a fairly high number of students miss “distance” on the word identification subtest because they accent the second syllable. When read in a sentence, this same student, 20 minutes later, reads the word correctly.

Shay wrote:
>
> There isn’t. I have found that there are orthographic
> exceptions to sounds, due to how our mouth works when certain
> sounds follow other sounds, I don’t know, but the
> combinations listed in are the most used ones. Also, as I
> said, when the child gets to that point in PG, the brain is
> working and it doesn’t matter that he would say
> /in/i/tae/ate, because they just naturally change it to the
> right word. After all, that is what good readers do, isn’t it?

Good readers do — but, what about the readers who aren’t? Because believe it or not, there are some readrs who “get to that point” who *don’t* naturally change it to the right word (they sorta didn’t read the teaching manual, I guess.)

Interestingly enough, my son does change the word to the correct one about 75% of the time—and I wouldn’t be him in the good reader category!! He nevers reads unless we make him!!!

The bigger challenge is when the words aren’t in his vocabulary. Then he is pretty clueless.

Beth

I think that we are missing something here, the dictionary. Our kids are going to have to use it for more words maybe than other kids, but having said that, I’m not sure. Many of my kids in my academic English class don’t know how to read some words because they have never seen them before. These are words that we would think that an 11th grader would know, but they don’t. I think that we think that our kids are the only ones that have vocabulary problems but that also isn’t true. I hate to say it but most kids don’t read any more. I have some students that read every night, now that they know how. Their teachers tell me that they are reading very well in class and their grades show it. I don’t think that the culprit is decoding as much as it is having heard the word while looking at it; this is why I think that reading to an older child while following along in a book is so important. We have all of the stories in the lit books on CD rom and I play them for my students while they follow along in their books.

I have several observations:

1. LD readers do not seem to have the “mental flexibility” of nonLD readers. In other words, they tend to get stuck on one way to decode or pronounce a multisyllabic word, or any other word. Whereas capable readers seem to intuitively grasp that the English code is full of variability. I know, we have some 80% or so consistency (if you count each vowel and vowel team having the potential to refer to 4 different sounds and some vowel sounds having 5 spellings, if you call that consistency!!!) in our orthography, ha, ha! Anyway, when we open it up to multisyllabic words, the issue becomes even more cloudy with accent thrown in. Capable readers seem to grasp this variability and they can play with pronunciations until they arrive at something they either recognize (vocabulary comes into play here) or think is the probable pronunciation. As an aside, the word “segue” is a very popular word these days. I knew it in my speaking listening vocabulary, but I had no clue of its spelling. So, for a time when the word started popping up in print, I mentally read it as “seg you” until one day the light went on and it dawned on me this was how “seg way” was spelled.

2. So, one way of approaching the issue is to perhaps TEACH our students to play with word prounuciations in our lessons. We may use real words or nonsense words. Model what we, capable readers, do when we are working on a multi-syllabic word. Coach the students through this process, pointing out how chunking and rechunking, changing the accent, etc. changes the pronunciation. Like all teaching we do with our LD reading population, this type of activity will take much modeling, then much coaching through guided practice to eventual independent practice then application.

Word reading is counterintuitive to this population of people. It seems to work against their grain. We can succeed in teaching, but the task requires intensive teaching every step of the way to show these youngsters how to do what is intuitive to many of the rest of their classmates. Yes, classroom teachers need to be doing this, too since the LD reader only represents the more extreme end of the curve, there are quite a few youngsters who need explicit teaching in all aspects of word decoding as they learn to read, including advanced code.

I use the end grid patterns shown at the end portion of the Lindamood Bell LiPS program. It is helpful when combined with learning and becoming quite solid with syllabication ( open and close syllables). If taught to look for and make patterns ( tion, ture) etc. my students become quite proficient at seeing the chunks, labeling them, identifying vowel sounds based on open and closed syllables. Most of my students are extremely limited readers at the 7th - 10 th grade levels. The program is so systematic. ( It does not address fluency and other things) Check it out.