What about Decodable Texts?

So here’s the deal: Teaching someone to read is not teaching them to guess by looking at a picture or by guessing what a word might be according to the context. There is a science to teaching reading. Most Structured Literacy instructors begin with closed syllable, short vowel words. In order to get students to practice using the knowledge and strategies they are learning, students need texts that match what they are taught . Ideally decodable texts are used when a student is beginning to read. Here is an example of a sentence that might be found in a decodable text:

Jim and Dad can fish with a rod at the pond.

In order for a child to read this sentence, they must have been explicitly taught the following skills:

• Letter recognition and sound for Consonants: j m n d c f w r t p

for Digraphs: sh and th

for Vowels in closed syllables: i a o

• Non-phonetic words: a, the

The teacher will use the prompts that a student has been taught to guide the student in decoding the words in the sentence. For example, my students are taught to recognize the vowel and its sound first, if they are stuck on a word. Therefore, if my student had trouble with the word ‘pond’, my prompt would be “o says /o/; what’s that word?” If the student could still not decode the word, we would review each sound and blend it together, just like we have practiced long before reading the book. If the student did not recognize the word ‘the’, the prompt would be “that’s a red flag word; it’s ‘the.’” The strategy for reading phonetic and non-phonetic words is not the same.

Learning to read is a labor - intensive process for the majority of students (approximately 65%). Once reading skills are acquired, the process becomes less laborious for some, but not all. Below is a link provided by IDA Ontario for a list of decodable texts available for purchase.

https://www.idaontario.com/decodable-readers-and-text/