8.1 Differentiating Closed Syllable Instruction for Students with Dyslexia

Reading Words (Decoding)

1. Point to the word where the student made an error. Have them identify the sound they had trouble with. For example, if they read the word van as pan, point to the 'v' and say, "What sound does this letter make?"
2. If students cannot produce the correct sound, you should provide it to them and have them make the sound. If they are struggling with articulation, this is a great time to use mirrors to allow the student to look at your mouth shape and have them try to replicate it. For example, say, "Look at my mouth when I make the /v/ sound. My teeth are on my lip. Can you do that too?"
3. Encourage the student to blend the sounds together: /v/, /ă/, /n/, van.

Spelling Words (Encoding)

1. Point to the word where the student made an error and stretch the sounds in the intended word. For example, if they spelled the word tub as gub, say, "When you read this to me, you said tub. Let's stretch those sounds: /t/, /ŭ/, /b/."
2. Have students look at how they spelled the word: "Now, let's look at what you wrote and check the sounds: /t/, /ŭ/, /b/. Do the sounds match?" If students say yes, direct them to the specific letter (or letters) where they made an error.
3. Fix the error. For example, "You wrote a 'g' for the /t/ sound. What letter makes the /t/ sound?"

Selecting words for additional practice is essential! You want to provide students with many opportunities to practice the sound or spelling pattern they are struggling with. For example, if a student writes the word bad for bat, they might be struggling with words that have the ending sounds /d/ and /t/ ... and perceiving those sounds. Since those sounds only differ in their voicing — /d/ is a voiced sound, and /t/ is an unvoiced sound — we would want to practice with words that have those sounds at the end so students can deepen their understanding of which letter to use to represent each sound. For practice, you might select words like hat, kit, net, nod, hid, and bud to provide many opportunities to demonstrate their understanding. Our Short Vowel Word List (opens in new window) is a great resource to select words for practice.

Activities to Use

• Elkonin Boxes
• Build a Word Strategy
• Word Chaining
• Word Sort
• Word and Sentence Dictation
• Word and Sentence Decoding for Fluency Practice
• Phoneme-Grapheme Mapping

Additional Considerations
Some patterns may be easy for students to read but less straightforward for spelling. For example, when practicing basic closed syllables, students may be able to read words ending in double letters without specific instruction as to why these letters are doubled, like mess, puff, and well, but may require explicit teaching of the FLoSS(Z) rule to spell those same words.

What You Might See
Students may have difficulty selecting the correct spelling of a sound, for example, spelling cat as kat or cot as kot. We call these types of errors orthographic.

Why You Might See This
If a student spells the /k/ sound with the wrong letter pattern, like kat for cat, they are making an orthographic error. This means that the student is correctly perceiving and representing all of the sounds in the word, but they chose the wrong spelling pattern for representing that sound within a specific word.

Strategies to Support Your Students

1. Identify the /k/ sound on the sound wall with both of its common spellings ('c' and 'k'). Note that there are other spellings for /k/ (such as 'ck' or 'ch'), but students probably have not been taught digraphs at this time. List the letters in order of frequency on the sound wall. For example, 'c' is more common than 'k' at the beginning of words.
2. Provide a visual of the correct spelling of targeted words.
3. If the student is spelling by replacing a more common pattern with a less common pattern, explicitly discuss which letter pattern is more common. Until the student is ready to learn the general pattern — for example, that /k/ is represented by 'c' at the beginning of words unless there is an 'e', 'i', or 'y' after it, like in kit or Ken — consider tailoring your spelling lists to only include those words that are "fair" (words with the beginning /k/ sound represented by 'c') and avoiding words like kit, Ken, kiss, and kin. "Fair" means that you have already taught students this pattern and can now hold them responsible for applying the convention in their spelling.
4. Explicitly teach the spelling pattern, like 'c' vs. 'k' at the beginning of words, through a guided activity like a word sort.
5. Provide students with multiple opportunities to read the target pattern in word lists, sentences, and decodable text that includes many instances of the pattern. Students can be asked to highlight or circle words with the target pattern and to read the text multiple times as needed.

Activities to Use

• Phonemic awareness warm-up activities like Stretch and Say or Roller Coaster
• Word Chaining
• Word Sort
• Word and Sentence Dictation

Additional Considerations

• You can also add work with sounds and visual discrimination tasks, for example, showing students the word spelled two different ways and having them choose the correct spelling. Anytime that you use visual discrimination, you should follow it with spelling practice and review of the correct spelling. This strategy should only be used after extensive explicit instruction.
• Only use words that would be identifiable to the student. For instance, most students do not have a clear visual representation of the word cob because they have not had many opportunities to read it. Instead, a word like cup should be easier to distinguish since it has likely been frequently represented in print for the student.