Decoding
Decoding skills are the true backbone of reading. When a reader decodes, the process of translating printed letters and words into speech occurs. Decoding requires readers to associate letters with sounds, blend the sounds together, and then decide how the word represents that combination of letters.
When children have poor decoding skills, they falter when coming across words they don’t know. Because they lack decoding strategies, these readers – often kids with dyslexia – engage in a series of bad habits in desperate attempts to sound out the words.
Kids who have poor decoding skills usually engage in one or all of the Three Pillars of Poor Reading. These pillars of poor reading are nothing more than bad habits that can be fixed. But unless the reader is given decoding strategies to override these bad habits, nothing changes.
The Three Pillars of Poor Reading involve guessing at words, memorizing words, and using trial and error learning to figure out what an unknown word might be. These are weak (or nonexistent) strategies for sounding out new and unfamiliar words.
When readers have weak decoding skills, they don’t have a workable system (strategy) to use when they come across new words. They usually panic and from there take wild stabs at what those words might be. Usually, these guesses are wrong.
Sometimes, they’re met with success!
That limited success is the worst danger of all to a child’s developing decoding skills! If these readers hadn’t been met with this random, limited success, they most likely would have moved on to another method of sounding out words. But those arbitrary successes keep them swinging in the game of “non-decoding” reading!
If a reader’s decoding skills are weak, fluency and comprehension skills suffer. It only makes sense. Due to the lack of strategies used to sound out words, too much guessing goes on. Mistakes are also made because consistency is missing.
Poor decoders end up stammering and stuttering while reading as they struggle to figure out words. This naturally slows down the ability to read quickly and efficiently. Because of this, fluency scores are affected in a negative way.
When these same poor decoders try to remember what they just read, it’s too laborious because of the misinformation they took in. All the guessing, attempts at memorization, and random efforts at determining what words are change the meaning of text.
Grades plummet because reading skills are poor! Reading affects every subject in school, so it’s important that students have strong reading skills.
Reading Automatically
Do you remember when you first learned to drive? There were so many things to think about. The oncoming traffic, turning signals, traffic lights, stop signs, braking, steering, and staying within the lines on the road.
But after a while, you probably found yourself arriving someplace when you didn’t even remember part of the route – of how you got there.
This is called automaticity.
Automaticity is an activity that is performed involuntarily or unconsciously as a reflex or ingrained habit. It’s very important for decoding. After all, if you had to consciously sound out each separate letter as you read, it would take a long time and require too much effort.
Reading (decoding) is a lot like driving and requires automaticity because, just like driving, there are a lot of activities going on – all at the same time.
The brain, the eyes, and the ears must all work together as a team to make decoding an easy, automatic process if fluency and comprehension are to be strong. And…there are just so many different skills at play when a reader is decoding text!
Following is a list of the main skills used when reading:
- visual memory
- auditory memory
- visual discrimination
- auditory discrimination
- visual closure
- auditory closure
- tracking across a page
- saccadic eye movements
- directionality
- auditory figure ground
- visual motor integration
- visual sequential memory
- spatial relationships
- sequential auditory memory
- auditory sequencing
- phonemic awareness
- auditory blending
- auditory figure ground
- visual sequential memory
- visual spatial memory
- understand what was read (comprehension)
- blending sounds together to form a meaningful word
If you think about it, it’s really a wonder any of us can read!
Just like driving, most of us figure out how to read with some form of efficiency. But, all too often, kids struggle to put all these pieces together, especially those with dyslexia. School becomes a torture chamber for them. Often, they’re asked to read out loud in front of the class, which causes deep embarrassment.
These kids learn to avoid reading at costs. But they shouldn’t have to! They simply need a system that teaches them to decode in a way they can understand, not one geared for mainstream learners.
Letter-Sound Recognition
The first step in helping a struggling reader is to make sure letter sounds – including both long and short vowel sounds – are strong and can be used with automaticity. This is the first step of decoding!
It’s amazing how many struggling readers simply aren’t strong in letter-sound recognition! Even teens will fail to show strength in this area, especially with those tricky vowels! Instead of taking the reader all the way back to square one and working on letter sounds, most schools and programs will take readers where they should be and try to strengthen skills from there.
This doesn’t work!
Reading has a hierarchy to it, and all this does is frustrate the reader, make grades drop, and give the reader a low self-esteem.
Kids need to be strong in letter-sound recognition before being asked to blend two or more sounds together! If a fifth-grader is weak in letter-sounds, then that’s where instruction should be – not in grade-level material, because the reader doesn’t have the decoding foundation for this. Out of desperation, the Three Pillars of Poor Reading set in, and the student is guessing wildly at words instead of strategically sounding them out.
If the reader is taken back and taught letter-sounds until mastery is met, then the reading foundation can be built one step at a time! The Bravo! Beginner uses brain-based learning and gross motor movement to teach letter-sounds quickly – all in a way you’ve never seen before. Cross-lateral movement is the key to making the sounds “stick” when all other methods have failed!
These movements are how the brain builds new neural pathways, and it’s much more efficient than typical phonics sheets, flash cards, and boring workbooks that only serve to frustrate the dyslexic learner.
Blending Two Sounds Together
Once letter-sounds can be recognized and used with automaticity, it’s time teach the reader how to blend two letter sounds together to form a word.
The reader has to understand that each of the letters is, in essence, a code. And, here’s the tricky part. These two sounds (codes) come together to form a consistent sound, which is a word.
Nonsense Words
Yes, there are many two-letter words in our language that kids can learn to decode with. At Bravo!, we know to also use nonsense words. The use of nonsense words helps to break bad habits or prevent them from starting in the first place.
Kids are meaning-driven – especially those with dyslexia.
In an effort to understand what they are reading, kids with dyslexia will focus on the meaning of the word instead of blending the sounds together to decode the word. If they can’t immediately figure out what the word is – without decoding it – they will often guess at it.
Nonsense words take this guesswork out of the equation because the decoder has no choice but to focus on blending the sounds together. There is no meaning to a nonsense word, and decoding is the only choice when reading a nonsense word! Guessing isn’t an option.
Nonsense words are made up words that have no meaning. For two-letter words, we use nonsense words that start with a vowel and end with a consonant, words like “ot”, “am”, “it”, and “ux”.
These two-letter words are also often some of the forty-four phonemic units, those little units of sound, that form our language, so the reader receives a double-dose of reading instruction at Level 1 of the Bravo! System.
Following is an example of Level 1 of the Bravo! Reading System, where learners focus on decoding two-letter words. Some are real words, but most are nonsense words. Readers use dot dabbers or bingo markers and the print is extra-large to ensure success!
Our readers use dot dabbers or bingo markers to decode these phonemic units of sound. We capitalize on gross motor movements this way, which is exactly how kids with dyslexia love to learn. As a matter of fact, most kids with dyslexia are hands-on learners. This means they learn by doing, so movement is crucially important to their learning success!
Right off the bat, we start in with proper decoding habits, which is a lot easier than going back when the reader is older and helping to break those bad habits!
Add gross motor movement to the equation, and now the dyslexic reader is learning to decode!
All too often, traditional reading programs don’t spend enough time on the important step of having the reader practice blending two letters together to form a word. They are expected to jump right in and decode three letter words.
This can be difficult for young learners or kids with dyslexia, who might be at a different development spot than their peers.
There are many more steps in the process of decoding! At Bravo, step-by-step, we add another piece of the decoding equation until the reader is able to sound out multi-syllable words – stress free and with confidence!
Once the reader passes the Bravo! Checkup on Level 1, we move straight to sounding out three-letter words with a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. This is only logical! Going from two-letter words to three-letter words while learning to decode isn’t logical just to us – it makes sense to the dyslexic learner as well.
Traditional reading programs fail to teach decoding, teach it for too short of a time, or teach it in a way that doesn’t resonate with a dyslexic reader.
Kids with dyslexia learn differently, so they need a system to decode that’s different than mainstream methodologies. As mentioned before, these kids need to move! And they need visual and auditory cues, as these are not their strongest avenues of learning.
These kids need predictability as well. That’s not “drill and kill” worksheets or hours of flashcards that don’t do any good. No, this learner needs to know what to expect next. Kids with dyslexia worry about next steps – it’s how they survive a “topsy-turvy” world.
The dyslexic reader needs brain-based learning (most kids do as well) to make the process of setting in skills easier. It’s also more fun this way, as movement is involved once again. And of course, most people know that the dyslexic reader needs to learn through a multi-sensory manner.
Up the hierarchy ladder the decoder goes. We ensure mastery is achieved at each step along the way with a quick end of level checkup (evaluation). If the reader passes the Bravo! Checkup, then the reader moves to the next level. If not, a recipe of more practice follows. Rinse and repeat until decoding becomes an automatic process.
Phonemic Awareness
Another important component to decoding is phonemic or phonological awareness. This is the ability to recognize and work with individual units of sound (phonemes). The process of phonemic awareness includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and manipulating these small units of sounds in spoken words.
Phonemes are the smallest parts of spoken language that come together to form words. Our language is made up of forty-four phonemes. Units of sound like “am”, “it”, “ed”, “op”, and “ug” are examples of phonemic units or phonemes.
Phonemic Awareness Helps Kids with Dyslexia
Research tells us that kids with dyslexia learn best by becoming familiar with those forty-four phonemic units of sound.
At Bravo! (after mastering letter sounds, two-letter words, and three-letter words), we keep adding rungs to the phonemic ladder. We stretch phoneme awareness skills by adding blends (both consonant and vowel), the elusive and frustrating silent e, word endings, variants (words that don’t follow basic rules), and then get kids sound out multi-syllable words.
This makes sense to the dyslexic reader! By not getting overwhelmed, skills are added one fun, easy step at a time.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach
Another way that helps kids with dyslexia master decoding skills is to use an Orton-Gillingham based program.
It’s important to have a strong set of rules in order to form strong reading skills. The Orton-Gillingham approach to reading and spelling is highly structured, which helps the dyslexic reader. Once again, it is based on those basic forty-four phonemic units.
It is based on research done in the 1930’s by neuropsychiatrist and pathologist Dr. Samuel T. Orton and educator, psychologist Anna Gillingham.
Kids with Dyslexia Need a Multisensory Approach
The researchers believed that students with severe dyslexia needed a multisensory approach, especially in the use of auditory, visual, and kinesthetic channels. A multi-sensory approach means students are learning language by hearing, speaking, seeing, and writing. The process involves listening to sounds and saying the sounds and names of letters while writing them.
At Bravo!, we add some other components to this process, knowing how kids with dyslexia can also have dysgraphia, which is a writing “dyslexia”. Writing can be problematic for the dyslexic student, so we use dot dabbers or bingo markers along with visual and auditory cues.
We add in color, pictures, predictability, brain-based learning, and cross-lateral movements to add “steroids” to the Orton-Gillingham approach.
This is what turns your word-guesser into a word reader. Once decoding skills are mastered, your child’s fluency and comprehension scores soar. As a consequence, you’ll have a confident student. Report cards are a source of pride. Test scores rise. Homework can be done in less time without tears and fits.
When your child is a fluent reader, a whole new world opens up!
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