Building Strong Decoding Muscles with Vowel Flexing

Fans of Structured Literacy love phonics (obvi!). But what do we do with the zillions of words that have difficult vowel(s) pronunciations? The increasingly popular heart-words approach can be helpful, AND there is an evidence-based teaching technique that can help students decode words that have challenging vowel pronunciations. So, let's go beyond basic phonics and explore what is called in the research world “ Set for Variability” or as some call it, “vowel flexing.” Let’s look at some difficult words to decode: stomach, was, shoulder, ninth, touch, tongue, wash, said. They all have what is called a “variant vowel pronunciation”. Each of these examples has either a schwa (that “uh” sound; like being punched in the stomach) or one of multiple vowel digraph options. It’s incredibly important that our students become skilled at being flexible with their vowel sounds. Why? Because of over 5,000 of the most frequently occurring words, over 50% contain a variable vowel pattern, including those containing schwa. Our students will see these words early and often. We need to develop our students’ vowel flexing muscles. They need to be able to go from a decoded word that is attempted and incorrect to changing the vowel sound to find the correct pronunciation. So, if a student attempts to decode the word “ninth” and attempts a short “i” sound, we can prompt them to “flex” in two ways.

1) Is there another vowel sound you can try? (More challenging prompt)

2) Try the “ long i” sound. (Prompt with more scaffolding)

Or, a student reads the word “frown” with the “ow” making the sound in “low”. You can use either of the two prompts above to guide the student to find a word they recognize. Given enough practice, students will start flexing independently when they realize the word they are attempting isn’t a word they know. Laura Savage and colleagues at the University of Florida found the “flexing ability” can be trained and that phonics instruction plus instruction in flexing yield better results than current best practices in small group reading programs. Here’s to building those flexing muscles and empowering our students with strong decoding skills!