Kathleen Sylva
May 5, 2011
Students who read single-syllable words often have
difficulty reading multisyllabic words (Just and Carpenter,
1987).
Explicit instruction in recognizing syllables and morphemes
gives students additional strategies for reading longer words.
Students in fifth-grade and beyond must know how to
decode multisyllabic words, as the majority of words they
will find in text are seven or more letters, and two or more
syllables.
Students must be able to “chunk” larger words into syllables
as part of the process of recognizing it.
What is a syllable?
 A syllable is a word or part of a word pronounced as
a unit.
 A syllable may contain more than one vowel letter,
but the letters will represent only one vowel sound.
 The ability to segment and blend syllables facilitates
the accurate and rapid identification of multisyllabic
words (Ehri 1995).
What are the six major syllable
types?
 Closed: A syllable ending in one or more consonants and
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having a short-vowel sound spelled with one vowel letter.
Open: A syllable ending with a long-vowel sound spelled
with one vowel letter.
Vowel Combination: A syllable with a short-vowel, longvowel, or dipthong sound spelled with a vowel combination.
r-Controlled: A syllable containing a letter combination made
up of a vowel followed by the letter r.
Vowel-Consonant e: A syllable with a long-vowel sound
spelled with one vowel letter followed by one consonant and a
silent e.
Consonant-le: A final, separate syllable containing a
consonant followed by the letters le.
What is syllabication?
Syllabication is the division of a multisyllabic
word into separate syllables, with each syllable
containing one vowel sound.
Syllabication is considered by some to be an
important strategy that helps students read
words.
-BHATTACHARYA & EHRI, 2004
What are the approaches to
syllabication?
“There are basically three different research-based
approaches to teaching students how to decode
longer multisyllabic words.” (Archer et al. 2003)
1. Using syllable types and division principals.
2. Identifying affixes or word parts.
3. Using flexible syllabication strategies.
What are syllable types and
division principles?
 Division principles emphasize the identifying and
reading six common types of syllables.
 Students are introduced to the vowel sound within each
common type of syllable.
 Henry (2003) suggests that students first practice the
identification of syllable types in single-syllable words
before identifying them in multisyllabic words.
 According to Shefelbine and Newman (2004) open and
closed syllables make up about 75% of syllables and are
called “the basic building blocks of polysyllabic
decoding.” Knowledge of open and closed syllables
increases students’ ability to read multisyllabic words.
Unlike rigid rules that are too complicated and numerous to
be helpful, familiarity and flexibility with syllable-division
principles help students to develop strategies for reading
longer words (Carreker 2005).
These principles help novice readers “see” the chunks, or
patterns of letters, in multisyllabic words and guide correct
pronunciation (Moats 2005).
Certain more useful or reliable principles are worthwhile
pointing out because they do get readers closer to identifying
a multisyllabic word by providing a way to approximate the
pronunciation (Chall and Popp 1996; Blevins 2006).
Spoken language syllable divisions often do not coincide with
the conventions for dividing written syllables. –Moats, 2005
Use caution when looking up syllable breaks in a dictionary
because most dictionaries divide words in a way that has little
to do with the spoken word.
For example, when sounding out a word, it matters little,
whether a student pronounces simple as “simp-le” or “simple.”
What is important is that each unit is pronounceable (Adams
et al. 1990).
Divide two-syllable compound words between the two
smaller words (e.g., in-side, pan-cake).
Inflectional endings such as –ing, -er, -es, -ed, and –est often
form separate syllables.
Never separate the letters in a consonant or vowel digraph,
vowel dipthong, or r-controlled vowel across syllable
divisions.
One of the syllables in a multisyllabic word usually receives
more stress, or emphasis. In two-syllable words, the stress
usually falls on the first syllable (e.g., mo’ment, fa’mous). In the
unstressed syllable, the vowel sound often is “reduced” to a
schwa (e.g., wa’gon, cac’tus).
Some researchers suggest teaching students to use root words and
affixes to decode multisyllabic words (Venexky 1970; Chomsky 1970;
McFeely 1974).
Syllable divisions often occur between word parts. Affixes that
function as syllables are worth teaching because they are “limited in
number, occur frequently, and especially in the case of suffixes are
reasonably consistent across words” Shefelbine and Newman (2004).
In the part-by-part strategy, students are taught the pronunciation of
an affix in isolation, asked to identify and say it in a word, and then
instructed to read the whole word (Archer et al. 2003; Engelmann et al.
19999). The assumption is that students will develop a strategy for
attacking multisyllabic words as a result of extensive practice in
reading long words and being exposed to recurring letter patterns
(Archer et al. 2003).
According to Carnine et al. (2006), this type of instruction should begin
with the introduction of the most common suffixes ( -s, -er, est, -ing, -le, ed, -y).
Students need to be taught flexible strategies for unlocking
the pronunciation of long words. –Archer et al., 2006
Rather than using rigid, rule-dictated syllabication, students
can be taught to recognize spelling units or “chunks” that can
be decoded (Bhattacharya and Ehri 2004; Archer et al. 2003,
2006).
The flexible strategy is based on the information that (1) a
high percentage of multisyllabic words contain at least one
prefix or suffix and (2) each syllable contains one vowel
sound.
The program teaches students to segment words into parts
by identifying the affixes and then the vowel sounds in the
rest of the word (Archer et al. 2006).
The best way we have found to teach and learn syllabication
of long words is to be playful, correcting errors with cheer
and laughing easily at humorous misreadings. – Chall &
Popp, 1996
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In past decades, students were taught a set of
syllabication rules, but today research supports a shift
from rigid rules to a more flexible approach to
decoding longer words (Archer, Gleason, and Vachon
3002, 2006.)
Why? Multisyllabic Word
Reading
Many big words occur infrequently, but when they do occur
they carry much of the meaning and content of what is being
read. –Cunningham, 1998
 From fifth grade on, the average student encounters about
10,000 new words each year. Most of these words are
multisyllabic (Nogy and Wnderson 1984).
 Without the ability to decode these words, the reader is unable
to understand the vocabulary and therefore equally unable to
extract meaning from what is being read (Perfetti 1986; Archer
et al. 2003),
 Several studies have shown that teaching students strategies
for decoding longer words improves their decoding ability
(Archer et al. 2006).
Researchers generally agree that instruction in multisyllabic
word reading can begin after students have mastered the
decoding of single-syllable words.
Other prerequisites include the ability to pronounce common
sound/spelling correspondences, especially vowel
combinations, to identify open and closed syllables, and to
pronounce affixes in isolation (Archer et al. 2003; Carnine et
al. 2006; Moats 2005; Shefelbine and Newman 2004).
Assessment in multisyllabic word reading should begin in
mid-second grade in order to plan effective intervention
(Shefelbine 1990).
 Teach decoding of multiple syllable words by
following best practices protocol:
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Assess
Introduce
Teach/Model
Guided Practice
Application ( Independent Practice)
There are a great many ideas for teaching decoding of
multiple syllable words found in Chapter 8, pages 272-318.
These ideas can easily be adapted to meet the specific needs
of students in any classroom whether students are beginning
to read multisyllabic words, or are older readers who are
struggling to read and understand multisyllabic words.