Two Pencils and a Book

Phonological Awareness is Essential to Help Struggling Readers Get this Resource here. Phonological awareness difficulties are the most common source of word-level reading difficulty (Hulme, Bowyer-Crane, Carroll, Duff, and Snowling, 2012; Melby-Lervag, Hulme, and Lyster 2012; Vellutino et al., 2004); however, phonological awareness is essential for skilled reading.  While most children develop this skill naturally, some weak readers will have little progress learning to read without phonological awareness training (Liberman & Liberman, 1990). Additionally, phonemic awareness is needed for efficient sight-word learning (Dixon et  al., 2002; Ehri, 2005; Laing &  Helme, 1999). Phoneme segmentation is of the least sensitive phonological awareness tasks and, after first grade, is not a good indicator of the degree of phonemic proficiency need for skilled reading (Kilpatrick, 2012; Swank & Catts 1994). Highly successful intervention involves eliminating the ph...

Multisyllabic Word Reading Research To progress in reading, students must have strategies for decoding big words.  From fifth grade on, the average student encounters about 10,000 new words each year. Most of these words are multisyllabic. (Nagy and Anderson 1984). It is helpful for students to be familiar with the common rules for syllable division. Knowing these rules and being able to apply them flexibly will help students decode longer multisyllabic words. (Carreker 2005; Henry 2010b)  According to Shefelbine and Calhoun 1991, “Low decoders, correctly pronounced fewer affixes and vowel sounds, disregarded large portions of letter information and were two to four times more likely to omit syllables.” Several studies have shown that teaching students strategies for decoding longer words improves their decoding ability. (Archer et al. 2006; Archer 2018.) Recognizing a Decoding Problem Symptoms : Guesses at words from context Avoids sounding out new words Confuses similar soun...