The Reading Teacher's Sourcebook - The Meadows Center for ...

What do students need to know about syllables?In order to use the strategy of identifying recognizable word parts within long words students must know:• That these words are composed of pronounceable word parts called syllables.• That each syllable contains one vowel sound (but that sound may be spelled with a vowelcombination as in maintain, with the letter y as in slowly, or even with a contraction in which thevowel letter is “hidden” as in couldn’t).• How to recognize syllables composed of common prefixes, suffixes, and root words.• How to divide the word into word parts, read each part, and combine the parts to read the word.• How to be flexible when a word has a part or parts that are phonetically irregular (also calledirregular words).Although there are other reasons that students may be taught the “correct” way to divide words intosyllables as they are in the dictionary, it is not necessary that students know the rules for dictionarysyllabication in order to read multisyllable words. What is essential is that when students see a long wordthey do not know, they quickly look for word parts they recognize, pronounce “chunks” of the wordseparately, and then put these chunks together to pronounce the entire word. Finding the vowels in theword can help students “chunk” the word into pronounceable parts.Syllable TypesOne way to help students recognize pronounceable word parts is to teach them the basic types of syllablesthat occur often in words and how these syllables are usually pronounced. Six syllable types are taught inseveral word recognition programs:• Closed syllables (pic-nic; ab-sent).• Open syllables (ve-to; a-pron).• Silent e syllables (de-bate; base-ball).• Vowel team syllables (re-frain; car-toon).• Vowel-r syllables (en-ter; or-phan).• Consonant-le syllables (bot-tle; bea-gle).• Other (syllables that do not fit these patterns) (gar-bage; fur-ni-ture).As you can see from examining this list, the first five syllable types have patterns that are common in shortsingle-syllable words. In describing these patterns, we will use C to stand for consonant and V to stand forvowel.Closed syllables are made up of the patterns VC (at, in), CVC (dig, mat), CCVC (plot, slug), CVCC (nest,mint), and other consonant blend patterns such as CCVCC (clamp). The vowel sound in a closed syllablemay be spelled with the letter y as in gym. Closed syllables can also be spelled using consonant digraphs,The Reading Teacher’s Sourcebook 235