Learn About Decoding With an Excerpt From 'Reading Above the Fray' 

In Reading Above the Fray, Julia B. Lindsey explains the essential elements of decoding, while providing guidance and routines to help teachers swap out ineffective practices for more effective research-based ones.

Find out what Dr. Lindsey has to say about decoding in the following excerpted chapter from Reading Above the Fray.

Decoding and Its Essential Elements

There’s magic in the moment that letters become something more. We’ve all seen it happen, we’ve all had the chance to marvel at the beauty of that moment for a child. Melissa Scafaria, a kindergarten teacher in Michigan, had the chance to see it more and more, thanks to a swap in her weekly routines. Skeptical, but curious about their power, Melissa introduced her kindergartners to a small number of meaningful, decodable texts matched to her phonics curriculum, in addition to the texts she typically used in her reading instruction.

When using decodable texts, she also shifted her instruction and prompting to focus children on decoding words. The effect was almost immediate. “Kids could decode words!” she said. Not only that, but across texts and contexts, Melissa’s students were also more confident and engaged when encountering new words in a way she’d never seen before.

Kids decoding words, that’s the magic—for them to realize they’ve been taught the information and skills they need to uncover a word all by themselves—and that they can do it whenever they read, for any purpose.

Decoding Defined

When readers decode a word, they use knowledge of the connections between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds) in that word. The most common decoding strategy is sound-by-sound decoding. Chunking words into parts using syllables or morphemes is also a decoding strategy.

Sound-by-Sound Decoding

/b/ /a/ /l/

Chunking

/play/ /ing/

As laborious as it may sound to us as skilled adult readers, beginning readers must have the chance to decode many words over and over to move toward automatic word recognition. After several successful attempts at decoding a word, a reader will memorize the word’s spelling, pronunciation, and meaning.

The process of applying sound-spelling knowledge to analyze a word (i.e., decoding) is a critical step in creating an orthographic map, which allows a reader to commit words to long-term memory. Then, the reader can recognize that word automatically. Decoding is the bridge between phonics knowledge and proficient word reading.

Melissa’s experience doesn’t need to be unique. By shifting her practice from focusing on phonics and reading separately to focusing on children’s decoding, she opened the door for her kindergartners to build the skills of strong early readers—without sacrificing joy, engagement, or comprehension work.

A critical stop along the way to reaching our big goals for readers is teaching children to decode using a sound-by-sound strategy. This is most effective for single-syllable words. Decoding may seem like the “flavor of the month” in reading circles right now, but it isn’t a trend. Decoding is a “big deal” precisely because it should be.

The Science of Recognizing a Word and Orthographic Mapping

For a long time, there has been debate about how readers recognize words. Do they recognize the whole word? Do they use portions of it? Do they use all its letters? Though there is always more to investigate, current research using eye-tracking technology and brain imaging provides a consensus that, to recognize a word, even proficient readers use its letters, and the position of those letters in relation to all the other letters.

Further, though context can help proficient readers recognize a word, they do not need it to recognize most words. No matter where you see them—in a book, on a billboard, in a chalk-written message on a sidewalk—you can automatically recognize simple words such as cat and more complex words such as catastrophe. And that is the goal. Automatic, accurate, effortless word recognition. In other words, we, as proficient readers, recognize words by reading letters, even though we might not realize it. So, it is essential that we teach children how to recognize words that way, too.

Proficient word recognition–in which a reader can automatically, accurately, effortlessly recognize thousands of words–is a must-have for fluent reading. And fluency supports comprehension, taking readers from the small moment of recognizing a word to the goal of reading instruction: comprehension.

Oral reading fluency and decoding accuracy also relate to comprehension of a text. Longitudinal studies continually find that letter-sound knowledge predicts decoding skills, which predicts reading fluency and comprehension. Although successful comprehension of a text requires more than just accurate word reading, research and theory indicate that accurate oral word reading supports successful comprehension.

Word reading can be efficiently and effectively taught in part through explicit instruction in systematic phonics. Ideally, that instruction leads to proficient, fluent readers who can read mostly by automatic, accurate recognition of words’ pronunciations and meanings from memory.

So how do children likely learn to recognize words automatically and become fluent readers who can comprehend complex texts? Current theories suggest that, to read an individual word, a child needs to create an orthographic map by linking the word’s orthographic information (spelling) to its phonology (pronunciation) and semantic information (meaning).

When a reader creates an orthographic map of a word, she retrieves the word’s meaning and pronunciation automatically, effortlessly from memory, when she encounters the word. To create orthographic maps and their sight word vocabulary, readers need to form connections between spellings and pronunciations, and that is achieved through decoding.

ship = /sh/ /i/ /p/

(orthographic map of the word ship)

Decoding Is the Best In-the-Moment Option

When proficient readers encounter a new word, they can, and do, use lots of different information to try to read it. Decoding is not the only way to recognize an unknown word. Readers rely on letters, knowledge of morphology, knowledge of other words, the sentence’s syntax, and context to “solve” a word.

Researchers from the 1960s and 1970s noticed that readers use multiple sources of information when reading words, which led to a theory that children became good readers by predicting words based on the text’s meaning, the sentence’s syntax, and some visual information. These ideas took off and became the basic underpinning of many current instructional practices in reading. There are three basic issues with using those ideas to drive our instruction.

1. Skilled word readers do not need to use multiple sources of information to solve words. Though readers can use multiple sources of information, proficient readers are primarily paying attention to each letter and the words’ orthography to read. By contrast, poor readers seem to rely more on context than orthography.

2. The most efficient and effective way for readers to recognize new words is through decoding. We need to build efficient, effective foundational skills instruction so that our students have more time and cognitive energy for other aspects of reading. We want to use the most effective and efficient instruction possible.

3. Children naturally want to look at pictures and also predict words using context. A major goal of decoding instruction is to instead focus children on using letters to decode words. That doesn’t mean that children won’t, or shouldn’t, continue to use context to understand texts. It means that we can help children use a more effective strategy (decoding) to recognize the words in the first place.

Decoding Is the Best Long-Term Option

In addition to helping children solve a word in-the-moment, decoding is best for long-term word recognition. It supports the creation of orthographic maps, allowing children to store a word’s spelling, pronunciation, and meaning in memory. When we give them the opportunity to decode a word several times (usually from one to eight times, depending on the word, context, and child’s knowledge), they can store the orthographic map they create in memory. Critically, knowledge of and repeated exposure to spelling patterns in words seems to facilitate orthographic learning. Orthographic learning is much faster than simply memorizing every word in the English language.

You might be thinking, “But if the goal is automatic word recognition, isn’t that basically the same as memorization?” Though it is possible to memorize words, research estimates that young readers learn several thousand words a year, and it is simply impossible to memorize that many words. Furthermore, memorizing words in the short term and/or using other information to predict words does not help children create orthographic maps. So even if children can identify a word, they don’t necessarily store it in long-term memory.

Decoding Is Motivating

Decoding might not seem that spectacular (though I hope after reading this chapter you think it is). Especially when done in isolation, it might seem like “skill and drill,” and it might seem incredibly hard for some children. But decoding a word correctly can be highly motivating and joyful. Just like the brief story at the beginning of this chapter, that “Yes! I read that!” moment is thrilling for a student (and a teacher) and far more likely when we’ve given children the right tools (such as decoding) and the right words (such as words they can read based on their knowledge of orthography).

Reading performance and motivation to read influence each other. Good reading leads to reading motivation, just as reading motivation leads to good reading. To support that relationship from the start and to meet our goal of successful and motivated readers, we need to recognize that the seemingly simple act of helping children learn to decode, and read lots of words they can decode, can bolster their skills and therefore, their motivation.

The Elements of Decoding

Acknowledging how word recognition works and why it is so important, we need to make choices that support it. That means teaching children how to decode familiar words. What does it mean to teach decoding? It means teaching first (or simultaneously) the elements of decoding.

Decoding is the product of phonemic awareness and knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences, which encompass these skills and subskills:

1. Oral language and vocabulary: Children need to know lots of words and their meanings to make sense of written language.

2. Print concepts: Children need to know what print is to use it to read.

3. Phonemic awareness: Children need to be able to blend and segment phonemes to attach them to spellings.

4. Alphabet knowledge: Children need to know the alphabet to work with our written system.

5. Sound-spelling knowledge: Children need to know how letters and letter combinations represent sounds to read words.

To read the word chomp, a child needs to know:

• The symbols on the page represent words

• ch represents /ch/, not /c/ and /h/

• o represents /o/

• m represents /m/

• p represents /p/

Sounds can be said one at a time and then slid through/blended to say a whole word.

These skills, applied together, allow a child to decode an individual one-syllable word. Without them, he or she will not be able to recognize and make sense of the word. They are slightly different from the wide range of foundational skills I discussed in Chapter 1. They are the skills that are most critical for word recognition by decoding.

Bringing It Together

In Chapters 3 to 7, I go into detail about each of these elements, how they relate to decoding and reading, and what instructional swaps you can make to ensure you are teaching them as efficiently and effectively as possible. By making those swaps, you will ensure children become proficient one-syllable word readers, one major step in becoming fluent readers.

For more on foundational skills, order your copy of Reading Above the Fray.