Principal 5
Decoding Instruction
Accomplishing this Principal in the Classroom
Decoding instruction allows students to apply phonemic awareness skills in order to pronounce words correctly. At this level, readers are able to take printed letters and produce sounds. I want to create a classroom where students can recognize early familiar words and are able to use strategies to figure out how to sound out more challenging and less familiar words. Exposing students to a variety of words and educating them with skills necessary for decoding will benefit their speaking, written, and reading abilities. This principle will require a great deal of explicit instruction. Many times if a student struggles with decoding, they will be less motivated to want to read because of their frustration level. I see this happen with my students who use Lexia Core 5, often times they refuse to play the games not because they don’t enjoy them but because they cannot achieve. This program is amazing for students to learn decoding skills, however I would like to move away from always using the computer to work on these skills independently towards working with peers and a teacher using written text. I want to take an interest survey to find out what topics excited my students the most, I will then use this to chose texts that are award winning and highly interesting for my class. I will choose texts that are rich in interesting and unusual vocabulary great for practicing decoding. Decoding is a difficult skill to test and requires one on one attention. Similar to phonemic awareness, it would be hard to determine the decoding proficiency of a student by working only in whole class situations. Also, teachers cannot repute a student based on one experience. Many factors can affect a student’s ability to decode like the reading level, the setting, and even learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
Specific Anchor & Grade Level Standards from CCSS
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.6.3: In order to decode words one must use their knowledge of language, including phonemic awareness, on order to speak them clearly and correctly while reading fluently. This correlates almost directly to the principle of decoding instruction. The CCSS covers up to fifth grade under their foundational skills, which explicitly include phonics and decoding. This is why sixth grade standards do not directly address decoding, however this standard can be applied because this skill is part of the knowledge of language the standard addresses.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.6: This standard is important in relation to decoding instruction because readers need this skill in order to recognize familiar words and read unfamiliar words for the first time. A reader who lacks this skill will struggle in comprehension and fluency. By skipping or reading unknown words incorrectly they are missing a piece of the overall meaning of a text. This can add up and severely take away from their experience reading. With a strong understanding of how to decode vocabulary students will benefit by increasing their vocabulary every time they decode and comprehend a new word. Thus, students’ written and spoken language will be a reflection of this enhanced vocabulary pool that they have at their disposal. Teachers must directly instruct their students how to decode so they they are confident to do so independently.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.L.6: This standard is important in relation to decoding instruction because readers need this skill in order to recognize familiar words and read unfamiliar words for the first time. A reader who lacks this skill will struggle in comprehension and fluency. By skipping or reading unknown words incorrectly they are missing a piece of the overall meaning of a text. This can add up and severely take away from their experience reading. With a strong understanding of how to decode vocabulary students will benefit by increasing their vocabulary every time they decode and comprehend a new word. Thus, students’ written and spoken language will be a reflection of this enhanced vocabulary pool that they have at their disposal. Teachers must directly instruct their students how to decode so they they are confident to do so independently.
Instructional Practices
MODELING MORPHOLOGY
Morphology simply defined is the study of form. In the context of language, it is the study of the formation of words. This can be connected to morphemes which are the smallest unit of meaning in a single word, therefore morphology studies how morphemes form words. Learning the specific steps to break a word into morphemes in order to understand it’s meaning is a skill that is taught to upper elementary students. In order to increase vocabulary and thus decoding skills one must understand morphology, which is knowing how to segment words into affixes and base words and find their origin. Early grades should focus on Anglo-Saxon vocabulary which are one-to two syllable high frequency words, such as “bat”. Upper grades use Latin and/or Greek vocabulary which have a higher amount of syllables and sometimes unique spelling patterns.
I will model to my students how to break words into morphemes. I will do this by reading aloud a text and stopping at a pre-selected Latin or Greek based word, such as bicycle. I will model how to decode with my knowledge of morphology. First look for recognizable morphemes, I see bi and cycle. Quick recognition of these word parts with my background knowledge of phonics tell me that bi is pronounced with a soft /b/ and a hard /i/, and cycle is pronounced with a hard /s/, hard /i/, hard /k/, and the suffix /-le/ which is pronounced as /ull/. This results in efficient decoding of the word. This unique spelling pattern is decodable and therefore I now understand how to read, speak and write this word. To practice I will provide students with a bag of affixes and root words, they will create their own words to form meaning. Then they will swap their word with a partner and decode their partner’s word. I will do this during my reading class with students who struggle reading fluently. This can be done for any reading level because as students increase in levels they are introduced to newer, larger words that need to be decoded in order to be read fluently. This aligns with text based beliefs about what readers and writers should know. I do not see any issues with this practice.
WORD WALLS
Within my classroom, I want to create a word wall in order to build decoding skills. I was introduced to this idea in methods this year. I think word walls are a great way to expose students to high frequency Anglo-Saxon based words. With this constant exposure to these words students will be able to quickly recognize them and efficiently decode them as they read. In my classroom, my word wall will be accessible and visible to all students for reference during writing, reading, and discussion. By applying the words in a multitude of styles, students will learn the words better and be able use them more consciously without having to reference the word wall. I want the teacher and students to decide what goes on the word wall. “Reading Rockets” offers the general framework of generating five words per week and I think that this is reasonable for my classroom. I will have students keep track of words in their ELA notebooks. These words will come from the novel that the grade is reading for ELA. For example, eon, gawk, and pseudonym are vocabulary words that my students have not recognized in Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief. In addition to including unfamiliar words, I will be responsible for generating words that are more common so that students can be automatic in recognizing them in texts and use them more in their writing. Transition words/phrases such as “for instance”, “therefore”, and “however” would improve the flow of student writing immensely. Every Monday each student will share a word that they want to contribute to the wall. I will transcribe these on the board and as a class we will vote for the five we would like to add. We will spend 10 minutes going over one in the beginning of ELA each day of the week. For instance, if the word is “memento” we will practice saying the word together, counting syllables in the word, writing the word, discovering synonyms based on the definition, and finding words that rhyme with the word. Repetition in listening, saying, writing, and even just looking at the words, will allow students to consciously retain the words.
One issue that may arise in this activity is that students will find word-wall words in texts and move on without having good understanding about what the words mean. For this reason, even if I do not choose the words students select for the word wall, I still want students to include their definitions for the words in their ELA notebooks. I will collect student journals weekly and make sure that students did understand and apply decoding skills for challenging words.
CUEING SYSTEMS
To help my students become good readers I want to teach them an additional strategy to help them as they decode text. This strategy is basically a cross check of all of the information that I have discussed prior. This part of decoding urges for students to think in metacognitive way while reading. This three-part cueing system is made up of meaning, structural and visual cues. While reading, if a reader says a word, they can quickly ask themselves: Did the word I said look right? Sound right? Does it make sense? To teach this strategy to my students I will model it during my read aloud in the first class of the day, ELA. When I come across a word that I do not recognize or question, such as dessert I will pause and model my thinking. First, did I connect the physical look of the letters to my knowledge of the way words sound? A mistake that I could make would be to say “bessert”, this is wrong however /b/ and /d/ resemble each other visually and I used visual cues to do this. Secondly, does what I said align with my knowledge of grammar and the English language? A mistake I could make would be to say “desert” instead of “dessert”, both sound similar. Thirdly, I would check the context of the word and see if how I pronounced it makes sense. In both of these mistakes I would catch myself here. If, for instance the context is my character eating a tasty treat after dinner. I remember that this is called “dessert” and know “bessert” is not correct. I know that “desert” is referring to a sandy place and not a tasty treat. Therefore, I used the cueing system to check my pronunciation of the word in question. I would create a poster of these steps and hang it next to the word wall. This way there is one area that students know to look when they need help decoding. I do not foresee any issues with this.
Morphology simply defined is the study of form. In the context of language, it is the study of the formation of words. This can be connected to morphemes which are the smallest unit of meaning in a single word, therefore morphology studies how morphemes form words. Learning the specific steps to break a word into morphemes in order to understand it’s meaning is a skill that is taught to upper elementary students. In order to increase vocabulary and thus decoding skills one must understand morphology, which is knowing how to segment words into affixes and base words and find their origin. Early grades should focus on Anglo-Saxon vocabulary which are one-to two syllable high frequency words, such as “bat”. Upper grades use Latin and/or Greek vocabulary which have a higher amount of syllables and sometimes unique spelling patterns.
I will model to my students how to break words into morphemes. I will do this by reading aloud a text and stopping at a pre-selected Latin or Greek based word, such as bicycle. I will model how to decode with my knowledge of morphology. First look for recognizable morphemes, I see bi and cycle. Quick recognition of these word parts with my background knowledge of phonics tell me that bi is pronounced with a soft /b/ and a hard /i/, and cycle is pronounced with a hard /s/, hard /i/, hard /k/, and the suffix /-le/ which is pronounced as /ull/. This results in efficient decoding of the word. This unique spelling pattern is decodable and therefore I now understand how to read, speak and write this word. To practice I will provide students with a bag of affixes and root words, they will create their own words to form meaning. Then they will swap their word with a partner and decode their partner’s word. I will do this during my reading class with students who struggle reading fluently. This can be done for any reading level because as students increase in levels they are introduced to newer, larger words that need to be decoded in order to be read fluently. This aligns with text based beliefs about what readers and writers should know. I do not see any issues with this practice.
WORD WALLS
Within my classroom, I want to create a word wall in order to build decoding skills. I was introduced to this idea in methods this year. I think word walls are a great way to expose students to high frequency Anglo-Saxon based words. With this constant exposure to these words students will be able to quickly recognize them and efficiently decode them as they read. In my classroom, my word wall will be accessible and visible to all students for reference during writing, reading, and discussion. By applying the words in a multitude of styles, students will learn the words better and be able use them more consciously without having to reference the word wall. I want the teacher and students to decide what goes on the word wall. “Reading Rockets” offers the general framework of generating five words per week and I think that this is reasonable for my classroom. I will have students keep track of words in their ELA notebooks. These words will come from the novel that the grade is reading for ELA. For example, eon, gawk, and pseudonym are vocabulary words that my students have not recognized in Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief. In addition to including unfamiliar words, I will be responsible for generating words that are more common so that students can be automatic in recognizing them in texts and use them more in their writing. Transition words/phrases such as “for instance”, “therefore”, and “however” would improve the flow of student writing immensely. Every Monday each student will share a word that they want to contribute to the wall. I will transcribe these on the board and as a class we will vote for the five we would like to add. We will spend 10 minutes going over one in the beginning of ELA each day of the week. For instance, if the word is “memento” we will practice saying the word together, counting syllables in the word, writing the word, discovering synonyms based on the definition, and finding words that rhyme with the word. Repetition in listening, saying, writing, and even just looking at the words, will allow students to consciously retain the words.
One issue that may arise in this activity is that students will find word-wall words in texts and move on without having good understanding about what the words mean. For this reason, even if I do not choose the words students select for the word wall, I still want students to include their definitions for the words in their ELA notebooks. I will collect student journals weekly and make sure that students did understand and apply decoding skills for challenging words.
CUEING SYSTEMS
To help my students become good readers I want to teach them an additional strategy to help them as they decode text. This strategy is basically a cross check of all of the information that I have discussed prior. This part of decoding urges for students to think in metacognitive way while reading. This three-part cueing system is made up of meaning, structural and visual cues. While reading, if a reader says a word, they can quickly ask themselves: Did the word I said look right? Sound right? Does it make sense? To teach this strategy to my students I will model it during my read aloud in the first class of the day, ELA. When I come across a word that I do not recognize or question, such as dessert I will pause and model my thinking. First, did I connect the physical look of the letters to my knowledge of the way words sound? A mistake that I could make would be to say “bessert”, this is wrong however /b/ and /d/ resemble each other visually and I used visual cues to do this. Secondly, does what I said align with my knowledge of grammar and the English language? A mistake I could make would be to say “desert” instead of “dessert”, both sound similar. Thirdly, I would check the context of the word and see if how I pronounced it makes sense. In both of these mistakes I would catch myself here. If, for instance the context is my character eating a tasty treat after dinner. I remember that this is called “dessert” and know “bessert” is not correct. I know that “desert” is referring to a sandy place and not a tasty treat. Therefore, I used the cueing system to check my pronunciation of the word in question. I would create a poster of these steps and hang it next to the word wall. This way there is one area that students know to look when they need help decoding. I do not foresee any issues with this.