As they progress through the grades, most students eventually learn phonics and become adept at deciphering single syllable words. However, a significant number of students have difficulty applying their knowledge of phonics to multisyllabic words. Alicia is a fairly typical example of a student who has this deficiency. She is able to read am and too and cap and her but stumbles over bamboo and chapter, which incorporate the sounds of these words. Alicia’s syllabication skills, which are sometimes known as structural analysis, are weak.
Unfortunately, Alicia has plenty of company. Difficulty decoding polysyllabic words is a stumbling block for many youngsters. As Hiebert and Bravo (2014) comment, “We are confident that the single most lacking area at the present time in beginning reading instruction in the U.S. is the failure to guide students in strategies for dealing with the many multisyllabic words in their texts” (p. 14). In their classic study of struggling readers in grades two and four in which errors were recorded and corrected, O’Connor, Swanson, and Geraghty (2010) found that “By far, the preponderance of errors was on multisyllabic words.”
More recently, the Literacy Research Panel of the International Literacy Association (2019) concluded that most literacy curricula present multisyllabic words too late. Decoding multisyllabic words should be introduced when the materials students typically read contain words of more than one syllable. Words such as seven, happen, given, under, over, mitten, and mother appear in beginning reading materials. (Upcoming posts will highlight ways to assess and teach syllabic analysis.)
References
Hiebert, E.H., & Bravo, M. (2014). Morphological knowledge and learning to read in
English. Santa Cruz, CA: Text Project. Retrieved from
ttp://www.textproject.org/assets/library/papers/Hiebert-Bravo-2014-
Morphological-knowledge-and-learning-to-read-in-English.pdf
International Literacy Association. (2019). Meeting the challenges of early literacy
phonics instruction [Literacy leadership brief]. Newark, DE: Author.
O’Connor, R. E., Swanson, H. L., & Geraghty, C. (2010). Improvement in reading rate
under independent and difficult text levels: Influences on word and
comprehension skills. Journal of Educational Psychology, 102, 1-19.
This is the first of a series of blog posts on syllabic analysis.