Words with short vowels can be especially difficult for students with dyslexia and other phonological difficulties because the sounds are so easily confused. Many of these students have trouble distinguishing not only short ‘i’ and short ‘e’, but other short vowels as well. This can result in extremely slow progress through these words, which can be discouraging for the child because these words typically come right at the beginning of reading instruction.
Here are some tips for working with these students:
Teach One Vowel at a Time
It is often helpful to teach words with one short vowel at a time, rather than introducing more than one short vowel simultaneously. This can help to limit confusion of vowels. If a child has already been exposed to all short vowels and is continuing to confuse them, try focusing on one vowel and bringing words with that vowel to mastery (e.g., CVC words with ‘a’) before moving on to another short vowel (e.g., CVC with ‘o’).
Use Visual Mnemonics
In addition to using keywords, such as apple for short ‘a’ or up for short ‘u’, some children benefit from a visual mnemonic. For instance, the letter ‘a’ (when written in manuscript writing) looks like an apple with a broken stem; the letter ‘o’ is the same as the shape of your mouth when you are making the short sound. There are also commercial programs with more elaborate mnemonic systems for learning letters, including vowels, that may help some children who are not making progress in these early stages of reading.
Increase the Emphasis on Spelling in Lessons
Some children do better when spelling short vowel words than reading them, perhaps because of attentional factors. The act of handwriting and spelling a word focuses the child’s attention on the print, whereas in reading, some children are inclined to guess at words based on the first letter. Spelling develops many of the same skills as reading, so for these students, it may be useful to increase the emphasis on spelling activities within lessons.
An activity that can be extremely useful is word-building with chains of words. Teachers can have children use letter tiles to spell words, or have children write words in a set of boxes, similar to a grid, with one phoneme per box. For instance, if a student is writing the word shop, the ‘sh’ would go in one box, because it is one phoneme; likewise, if using letter tiles, digraphs such as ‘sh’ should be represented on one letter tile, not using separate letter tiles for ‘s’ and ‘h’. The teacher dictates a series of words for children to spell, with minimal changes at unpredictable places in words, not always in the same place (e.g., not always the first letter).
For children who have learned all single consonant sounds plus short ‘a’ and ‘i’, but not digraphs or blends, a sample chain of words could be sat, sap, sip, nip, nap, nag, rag, and so on. If children have also learned the digraphs ‘sh’, ‘th’, and ‘ch’, along with short ‘a’, ‘i’, and ‘o’, a sample chain could involve hat, hot, hop, shop, ship, chip, chin, win, wig, wish, with, and so forth. The activity encourages children to look carefully at all the letters in a word and can be done in a game-like fashion that many children find very engaging.
In addition to benefiting students with dyslexia, this kind of activity can help other students with disabilities that affect phonology, such as some students with autism, and poor decoders who do not have disabilities.
