Building Reading Proficiency at the Secondary Level: A Guide to Resources

What is it? How does it work?

Background:
This family of strategies gives struggling secondary readers ways to decode unknown multisyllabic words by developing an awareness of word parts.

Overview:
Some struggling secondary readers have difficulty in decoding multisyllabic words. This difficulty can seriously impair comprehension, especially in expository text that secondary students are expected to read. When explicitly taught word analysis strategies, they can be successful. These strategies are described in a number of sources. One is by Thomas Gunning (1998).

Syllable Patterns. Student learn to identify and decode the pronounceable word parts within words.

Morphemic Analysis. Students learn to identify the meaningful parts of a word, such as compound words, prefixes, suffixes, and roots.

Contextual Analysis. Students learn to use verbal clues from the sentence or passage. If the context clues also contain unknown words, students will have difficulty using them.

The Word Identification Strategy. In this orchestration of word analysis strategies (Lenz & Hughes,1990) students learn a mnemonic, DISSECT, to help them decode unknown words during the reading of content area texts. The steps follow:
Discover the context (by examining syntactic and semantic cues).
Isolate the prefix (by dividing it from the root).
Separate the suffix (by dividing it from the root).
Say the stem (by reading what is left of the word).
Examine the stem (by dividing the letters and applying knowledge of phonics rules).
Check with someone.
Try the dictionary.
If decoding the stem at the E stage fails, students are taught to apply 3 rules of phonics. The rules are
Rule 1: If the stem or part of the stem begins with a vowel, divide off the the first 2 letters; if it begins with a consonant, divide off the first 3 letters;
Rule 2: If you can't make sense of the stem after using Rule 1, take off the first letter of the stem and use the rule again; and
Rule 3: Check the hints for pronunciation when 2 different vowels are together (these are provided to students). The strategy was found to work best when the word being read was in the student's listening vocabulary (Bryant, Vaughn, Linan-Thompson, Ugel, Hamff, & Hougen, in press).