Decodability simply means matching text to the progression of sounds that you’re using in your class. See here for a description of the progression that I use with older struggling readers. It is very important in the early stages for building confidence, fluency and preventing guessing as a primary strategy.
When judging the decodability of text at the Foundation levels, assign each word to one of four categories:
- Decodable = the student has learned all the sounds in the word.
- Decodable with one sound given = The student has learned all but one sound in a word.
- Probable sight word = Most older struggling readers come with some words that they “just know”.
- Freebies = technical term for a word which has two or more sounds that the student hasn’t yet learned.
At CVC, this means:
- tat, fen, mug, lop
- back, this, go (unknown sound in bold)
- the, is, and………they will surprise you.
- breakfast, cake, should (but they might “just know” these – everyone is different)
By the time you get to adding -tion, it looks like this:
- example, inventing, addressed, recognition
- equipment, intervention, anybody, agreement – Note, with unstressed and “long” vowels, students will often adjust the sound slightly to get the correct word.
- This will be completely individual
- should, physician, cough, bicycle
What actually happens by this stage is that your students are understanding how the language works and taking greater risks when faced with an unfamiliar word. As they are able to match up more symbols with their spoken sounds, decodability becomes less and less of an issue.
Are some words just not decodable no matter how much of the code you know?
Yes, but not very many. The ones that immediately spring to mind are one, once, two, who. There are other words with one unusual sound like people, laugh, leopard. I would love a list of words that really do need to be taught as sight words if anyone know of one.
Fortunately, for those of us working with older students, they often know a lot of high frequency words.
