By Laura Robb
“I didn’t guess!” Sofia tells me. I got it [says the word.]– incredible.”
“Tell me what you did,“ I reply.
“I looked through [the word]. And then I saw I could say in and ible and the e was short—cred. I put it all together.“
“You used the strategy of looking through a long word to find parts like prefixes and suffixes that you could say! Well done. All the practicing you did really helped!”
“Yeah!.”
Sofia, a fifth grader, has difficulty decoding multi-syllable words. Her recall of text details is good, even when she misreads several words or when she listens to her teacher read aloud. The above conversation reveals progress, but never feel discouraged if students return to the old guessing habit. Progress is never neatly linear. It’s a messy back and forth.
Sofia entered fifth grade reading at a mid-first grade instructional level. She could not distinguish short from long vowels, nor could she say the vowel sound when confronted with a word she couldn’t pronounce. She had little knowledge of consonant blends and digraphs. Her decoding skills were tentative, and Sofia’s main strategy was guessing. Sofia isn’t alone. Large numbers of students throughout our country live in the shadows, always on the periphery of learning in their classes.
Perhaps, students like Sofia fall through cracks in a school system because teachers, feeling the pressure of high stakes tests, focus their attention and interventions on students who, with support, can pass the state test in reading. In the shadows they lose confidence, don’t know how to choose books they can read. Sadly, they continue to slide backwards because they don’t read enough to improve nor do they receive appropriate interventions. Researchers agree that low reading volume combined with weak word knowledge results in minimal annual progress. Often, the small voice in these students’ heads is, I can’t do this, and gradually, as years pass, the drive to work hard to succeed diminishes, self-efficacy vanishes, and students mark time until they can drop out.
What Sofia Can Teach Us
Sofia’s decoding tank of tools was almost on empty. What frustrated her was the huge gap between her ability to think with text and her ability to read text. To build her knowledge of how our language works, she completed word sorts from Words Their Way letter-name book. Working first with short vowels and moving to long-vowel patterns, I discovered that each sort made sense to Sofia, and she was able to complete a sort with automaticity by the end of the week. However, two things became apparent:
- recalling different word patterns in text remained difficult because Sofia would forget the patterns and short and long vowel sounds still confused her; and
- applying word knowledge to continuous text wasn’t happening during the first three months of learning with her and others in the group, as there was no transfer from word sorts to text.
Sofia and others like her have had diverse phonics experiences in elementary school. However, they never absorbed the presented information to a level enabling them to apply it automatically to continuous text. The mantra of, “Well, they were taught it last year and they should know it,” is unproductive and blames the students.
When students don’t get a lesson, it’s teachers’ responsibility to find ways to re-teach and build lasting understanding. That’s what being a teacher means. Marie Clay so wisely explained that students receive and understand lessons differently. Knowing this, interventions should be an integral part of every core curriculum class. Undoing poor habits and building students’ self-confidence is more difficult the longer they stay in the shadows.
Solving Decoding Challenges
Sofia and others in her group continue to grapple with developing analogous thinking—the ability to transfer knowledge of a word pattern to an unfamiliar word with the same pattern. Students often complete sorts that I create based on what I observe when they read aloud to me. Hearing students read aloud one-on-one is an opportunity to learn about their process and to support them with questions that prevent them from guessing or skipping words. The goal is for them to use their knowledge of word patterns and the text’s meaning automatically. Here are some prompts/questions to try:
- If the word has a prefix, say it. If the word has a suffix say it. Look at the word that’s left and say it. Now put it together.
- Can you figure out if the vowel is long or short? It’s interesting that students could parrot the long vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. But confronted with a word like stripes, they couldn’t say the long i and substituted other vowel sounds. No internalization of these sounds had occurred.
- Sometimes, skipping the word and reading to the end of the sentence, then going back, rereading the entire sentence and trying to say the word helped. For example, one student stumbled and stopped on the word diapers. She quickly figured it out using this strategy because the end of the sentence noted that they were often wet and dirty.
If students don’t “get it” quickly, tell them the pronunciation in order to prevent guessing and a long a pause in the reading. Make note of the word and work on challenges you observed by creating individualized word sorts that give additional practice opportunities. It’s important to remember that when five to six years have gone by, it’s not possible to have a quick reversal, even with an extra daily class that includes daily interactive read alouds, choosing and practicing reading a poem a week for fluency, and guided and self-selected independent reading.
Time and Place Matter
When you work with a student one-on-one in order to provide reading feedback and support, find a separate place where your conversation and the student’s reading aloud are private. Self-confidence and self-efficacy are huge issues for students with reading challenges like Sofia’s. It’s crucial to continually point out every increment of progress and build the YET mindset of “I think I can with hard work and support.” Help them feel safe and provide beautifully written and illustrated books for reading.
Some Closing Thoughts
Believe me, it’s tough to be patient when you’re working thoughtfully, carefully, diligently, and progress, at times, seems minimal at best. Avoid blaming yourself, other teachers, and the children. Instead, DON’T GIVE UP. There’s no recipe or program to fix things. Your vigilance, observations, questions, and dogged determination to find ways to intervene—ways that move the children forward—will eventually bring about the changes you hope and pray for.
Know, too, that it’s difficult to engage and motivate the Sofia’s in our classrooms. They come with greatly diminished self-confidence, a lack of automaticity with reading, a lack of fluency, a lack of word knowledge, and little practice reading real books. However, as you support and help them read wonderful books, discuss them, plan interventions to increase reading skill, and provide books for self-selected independent reading, progress will surely come. It might not happen the year you learn with them, but with the kind of support that monitors reading behaviors and uses what’s observed to plan interventions, I have to believe it will come.
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