Page 15 - ABCTE Study Guide_Neat

Please keep in mind that any discussion of representing phonemes is secondary to the primary
objective of drawing the desired sounds out of letters and letter combinations that appear in words.
Recognizing the various forms that appear in written English will help students draw sounds from
written words, blend those sounds, and arrive at the intended word. This process is called decoding.

Decoding

One of the big two competencies for successful reading is decoding. The other is comprehension; let’s
see how the two are related.

Decoding means that the student is able to divine a word from a group of letters. This can be done
through the processes that are systematically and explicitly taught to students by their teachers. Those
processes in turn rely upon the discrete lessons and strategies with which the reader is equipped,
specifically for the purpose of being able to decode words. Let’s try some decoding ourselves. Check out
the following word:

exophthalmic

Whether you can comprehend this word is beside the point, at least during the decoding process. You
undoubtedly recognize it as a word and can break it down into its component parts (prefix, root, suffix).

Once a word is pulled from the decoding process, the reader’s ability to comprehend spoken language will
allow him or her to extract meaning from the word that he or she just decoded. That is, decoding turns a
written word into a spoken word; and if the student is not familiar with the word that was just decoded,
then the comprehension part of the equation has failed to produce a mental image for the reader.

Of course, encountering a certain percentage of indecipherable words will frustrate the reader. Such texts
are considered beyond the reader’s independent reading level. A picture book would probably be
accessible to younger readers—or older readers who have not yet mastered the decoding process, but
specialized texts (like astrophysics) would probably not be accessible to these readers.

The adjective exophthalmic, by the way, means “characterized by the prominence of the eyeballs.”

Etymology

Etymology is the study of word origins, as well as the different meanings the word has had throughout
its history. Etymology is taught explicitly, as the meanings of roots are not always intuitive. Explicit
word study is the vehicle for teaching etymology, and word study is virtually impossible without the
prerequisite mastery of sound-letter relationships.

The student who has gained a firm grip on a family of roots is now equipped to both decode and
comprehend derivatives of those roots.

The study of the prefixes and suffixes that one might tack onto these roots is called morphology,
which is also addressed later in this lesson.