Decoding

Sebastian Wren, Ph.D. 

 
Decoding text is half of the game of reading.  To be able to read, children must be able to comprehend language, and they must be able to decode text (see the Simple View discussion).  Simply decoding text, however, is not sufficient -- children must be fluent and highly accurate at decoding text.  Decoding should be as automatic as possible.  In the beginning, decoding is laborious, and a great deal of concentration must be devoted to sounding out words.  Once a child learns how to correctly sound out words, what that child needs more than anything is practice.  Time spent on task at this crucial stage is critically important, and the task that children spend the most time with is reading actual text.  Once a child has figured out most of the basics for sounding out words -- once the child has developed good decoding strategies -- the child needs to practice those strategies with real words in real text.

To learn good decoding strategies, children rely on more basic, more fundamental skills.  First, children must develop an understanding that words have meaning, and that there is a structure to text.  Children develop healthy "concepts about print" when they spend time lap-reading and reading interactively with their parents, caregivers and teachers.

Next, children must become familiar with the letters of the alphabet -- they must learn to easily identify and distinguish the letters.  They don't have to learn the letter names, necessarily, but they must be able to easily and individually identify them somehow.  Children must also develop an understanding that spoken words are made up of phonemes -- phoneme awareness is one of the biggest stumbling blocks that children face, and teachers must make sure that all children have phoneme awareness as soon as they can.  And children must put their knowledge of the letters together with their awareness of phonemes -- they must learn that the letters in printed text represent the phonemes in spoken language.  In other words, they must learn the alphabetic principle.

These are the fundamentals that give rise to good decoding skills.  Children who have these skills (concepts about print, letter knowledge, phoneme awareness, and knowledge of the alphabetic principle) in kindergarten usually go on to become healthy readers.  Children who are still learning these skills at the end of the first grade usually do not go on to become healthy readers (See "M is for Matthew Effect").

These basic skills are necessary, but not sufficient, for reading success.  Children must practice applying these skills with real words and real text.  They must be given many, many opportunities to write and read real connected text, and they should get many opportunities for feedback and instruction from teachers.

The primary goal is to teach children the patterns that exist in the English spelling system, but this is not usually accomplished by teaching some abstract rules about spelling-sound relationships -- children are good at finding patterns, but they are lousy at applying rules.  To emphasize the patterns that exist, instructional strategies like those advocated by Pat Cunningham (Making Words, Making Big Words, and Phonics they Use) are extremely effective.

I've written a document that outlines the essential knowledge domains that underly healthy decoding skills called "The Cognitive Foundations of Learning to Read," and I've also written a short document illustrating the difference between decoding and reading called "Decoding and the Jabberwocky's Song."  Also this article by Connie Juel and Cecilia Minden-Cupp is quite informative.

In English, there is a good deal of regularity between the letters and the sounds (phonemes), but there are also quite a few exceptions.  There are very few letters in English that always correspond to a single sound, and there is no one sound that always corresponds to a single letter (See "P is for Phonics").  English, it is said, has a "deep orthography," which basically just means that there are a lot of words that are not spelled the way they sound (e.g. "colonel" or "choir").  This is illustrated by the following table that shows the one-to-many relationship that exists between letters and sounds (phonemes).