Teaching Strategies for Reading Irregular Words

Danielle Colenbrander and Katie Pace-Miles discuss orthographic mapping, irregular word instruction, and the different terms used to describe high frequency and irregular words. They translate research about the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching irregular words. They also discuss the role of morphology - how understanding morphemes can help students decode and understand words. 

Takeaways

• Irregular words exist on a spectrum, ranging from completely regular to highly irregular.
• Different teaching approaches, such as mispronunciation correction, can be effective for teaching irregular words.
• Meaning and context play a crucial role in word recognition and understanding.
• Teachers should provide students with a toolbox of strategies to decode and understand irregular words.
• Temporary irregularity is a helpful concept for students, emphasizing that irregular words are only temporarily challenging until they learn the necessary grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

Resources

• Hear more from Danielle Colenbrander on Teaching Literacy podcast (Ep. 38) and Thinking Deeply About Primary Education podcast (Ep. 76)
• Assessing the Effectiveness of Structured Word Inquiry for Students in Grades 3 and 5 With Reading and Spelling Difficulties: A Randomized Controlled Trial by Colenbrander et. al. 
• Katie's PRINTABLE Word Analysis Manual, a resource to support learning and word analysis activities to use with high frequency words (and any word, really!)
• Treasure trove of additional research articles (Katie Pace-Miles, Devin Kearns, Linnea Ehri, and more!)
• http://reading-ready.com/ 

Our guests mentioned the work of Lyndall Murray but meant Bruce Murray. The correct article is linked above. 

 
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