English Decoding Seminar Highlights

What did we cover?

There is a distinction between ‘reading’ (decoding) and ‘understanding’ - they are connected, but they are ultimately two different processes.

How do we teach decoding?

• Have the child read aloud and ask: did they include all the sounds in the word?

• Be sure to let them complete the sentence and offer questions/corrections afterword.

• If they didn’t include all the sounds, point it out!

  • “Do the sounds you make correspond to the word?”

  • “I don’t agree with that vowel sound, let’s look at it one more time.”

    • Go through it again, figure out what sounds certain letters make, and try to put it together.

• Visualize the breakdown of the syllables and provide an indicator of length based on how many syllables a word has

  • banana has 3 syllables, count 1-2-3 as each syllable is stated out loud.

  • Pronounce the whole word and all of the syllables.

• Be sure to show them what they should be paying attention to as students need a lot of structure.

• Leave it open-ended with guidance

  • for instance, something isn’t right with this sentence. Can you see what needs fixing?

  • The capitalization is off for one of these words.

• Ask them to review it, then reward them - stress that they got they were able to overcome it.

• Let them know what they did well, and encourage them to try it again independently when you’re not there.

• If energy is spent on decoding, it is hard to put energy into understanding

  • Work to make the decoding process smoother by practicing these strategies or using text to speech tools (mentioned later)

Considerations for Understanding Pieces of Text

• Fiction vs Nonfiction

  • These texts have different purposes: Fun/study, or recalling facts?

• The way information is relayed is varied by discipline.

• Consider the organization of the reading, and that the student may have limited vocabulary in certain subject areas

• The student may not understand the complexity of a sentence

  • for example, when should you use then, before, and after?

Discipline-specific focuses

• Math - factual.

  • Time sequence words are very important in math

  • Distractor words for students in word problems - need to determine what is important and not important

• Science - prefixes and suffixes often arise in vocabulary

  • These are critical for understanding questions and content

• Social Studies - point of view

  • What is the vision? What are they trying to get you to believe?

  • Consider whose perspective that the writer is taking.

• Literature has two components:

  • literate construction - similes, analogies, metaphors

  • Literal - the words are exactly what it says.

• There are different tasks and purposes in each discipline - helping kids extract that information can help them make sense of it.

• Once again, students need clear direction on which skills to apply

How can we test for understanding?

• Ask what the purpose is of the reading. It is not necessarily obvious at times, so help them work through it.

• Encourage them to be critical of what you’re reading (point of view, consider that this person may have a different perspective)

• Ask them to read the word/sentence out loud

  • This helps to determine if decoding is accurate.

• Ask them to restate

  • Can you tell me the main points?

    • See if they took away what they were supposed to from the reading.

• Alternative strategies:

  • Draw me a picture of what happened, or draw yourself a picture to help understand.

  • We can attach some quotes or phrases to this picture to help you remember when you go back to study.

• Review incorrect decoding

  • Inconsistent English spelling

  • Missing grammatical information

  • Words that were misspoken, missing a prefix/suffix

  • Specific vocabulary words

• There are also a lot of text to speech programs to read aloud for the students.

  • Can help center the focus on understanding the written words and let the decoding take place separately.