Most of us are on board with the idea that students need to be  able to process the individual sounds in words in order to read and spell. Guessing at words based on the first letter, context, or picture clues aren’t effective strategies. Check. So, what happens when we work with students who seem to be able to decode words in isolation, or in our small intervention groups, and then continue to struggle with reading connected text, fluency, and comprehension? Why do some students still struggle to generalize and apply decoding skills? A missing piece: multiple decoding strategies. We know students need to pay attention to the sequence of all of the letters in a word, going from left to right, and use strong blending and segmenting skills. But sometimes “sounding it out” isn’t powerful enough to get students into the realm of fluent reading. Teaching students decoding strategies, how to choose the appropriate one, and how and when to apply the best strategy, will lead to students being cognitively flexible and meta-cognitive about their decoding. Here are a few strategies to think about:

• Sounding good: the good ol’ standby that must not be forgotten. This phonological letter-sound decoding strategy is a critical one for students to become adept at

• Rhyming: word identification by analogy using a bank of known keywords to decode unknown words with the same spelling pattern

• Take off the affixes: this strategy allows students to strip off prefixes and suffixes from a multisyllabic word to achieve a smaller word that can then be decoded using other strategies 

• Vowel flexing: this strategy is so important as students will encounter vowel combinations that have multiple options for pronunciation. We teach students which pronunciations are most common so they can start there, and flexibly apply multiple pronunciations until they arrive at a word they know ( note: don’t forget vocabulary! If the student can’t arrive at pronunciation that matches a word in their vocabulary, they might continue to struggle) 

Let’s look at what this looks like in action. Take the word “empowering,” and check out how we can teach strategy application: 

1. Recognize and take off the affixes “em” and “ing” 

2. You are left with “power”. Students can recognize the pattern “er” and would have been taught a keyword “her” to know the sound of “er”. They can think “if I know “her” then I know “er.”

3. Students will recognize “ow” as a vowel team that has multiple options for pronunciation. First, they can try “ow” as in the word glow. That won’t sound right, so…

4. Next student tries “ow” as in the word “pow”. 

5. Through strategy application, students arrive at the word “empowering!” 

Teaching multiple decoding strategies will empower (see what I did there?) our students to be more independent, strategic, and flexible with their application of skills. And once the decoding obstacles begin to crumble, our readers can access all of the joy of thinking, questioning, and analyzing what they are reading!