What is Decoding in Reading?

Literacy skills are definitely among the most important for every human being. They allow us to collect information, learn new things and explore  the world hidden behind our native and  foreign alphabets. 

A pivotal component of literacy development is decoding – the ability to translate written words into spoken language by understanding the relationship between letters and their corresponding sounds. 

Therefore, teaching comprehension of these foreign letters is an important task that  every English teacher faces. Let’s talk about decoding in reading to deal with teaching reading in a more effective way.

The definition of decoding is pretty simple:

Children who comprehend these connections can better identify unfamiliar words and quickly recognize those they are acquainted with. Most children benefit from receiving specific training in this area, even though they may occasionally figure out some of these correlations on their own.

Achieving such a result comes after admitting that reading and decoding skills are inextricably linked.

If your students have troubles with decoding, they will likely be unable to recognize the words that they have heard before in print as well as pronounce the words with unknown meanings correctly.

As you can see, teaching to decode lays a foundation of the successful acquisition of new vocabulary and reaching language proficiency in general.

The reader needs to determine the sounds that every letter produces straight after they have recognized the letters. This can be done by identifying the sounds connected to each letter using phonics principles. The reader must then combine the sounds of each letter to construct the word. To achieve this, they first sound out each letter, and then combine them.

For instance, a reader may identify the suffix after recognizing the well-known root word “comfort” in the lengthier term “comfortable.”

That is why the ability to decode is crucial. It helps readers comprehend the connection between letters and sounds.

Now, let’s look at some decoding strategies you may successfully implement in your lessons to improve your students’ reading skills. 

Use phonics

And it is a very common decoding strategy. Readers decode new words and increase their reading fluency by becoming familiar with the sounds that each letter produces. 

Flashcards, word lists, and other exercises are frequently used within decoding in phonics training to help students recognize and sound out words.

Practice with sight words

Memorizing these terms may assist with understanding and reading speed, as they are commonly employed in written language. Even beginners start their English learning  journey by acquiring  some of these words. “The”, “was”, “it”, “I” etc. are definitely among the sight words.

Look for context clues

Readers may frequently infer the meaning of an unknown word by carefully examining the words and phrases surrounding it. 

As for the decoding example in this case, it’s pretty easy to deduce the meaning of the word “surround” from the previous sentence. As you can see, it’s not necessary to explain or teach certain unknown words if students pay enough attention to the context.

Discover chunking

Reading starters can generally be more ready to interpret lengthier words if they read each segment independently and then combine them. By the way, chunking is commonly used in various types of drilling.

Apply visual aids

Readers can better comprehend and retain what they are reading if they can visualize the words and ideas. For struggling readers who have issues with decoding, this technique can be quite beneficial. Try using word maps, slides, pictures, board games etc.

However, surely there are some challenges you and your students may encounter while teaching to decode. Let's look through a short overview of potential difficulties:

Coming across unknown words

For readers who still need to become proficient in decoding, this can be quite challenging. In these situations, they might have to use other techniques or contexts to figure out what the term means.

Dealing with irregular verbs

For proper reading, students may need to learn these irregular words by heart.

Stumbling upon homophones (and everything that looks a little bit similar)

For instance, the words “ship” as a type of transport, “sheep” as an animal, and “ship” as a verb that means “think of two people in a romantic way, considering them a perfect couple” may be easily confused or misinterpreted by beginners.

For example, I once had a student who at some point exclaimed: “Gosh! How am I going to distinguish the phrase “let us” and “lettuce”?” 

Sure, there were no reasons to be afraid. However, it shows that even slightly similar letter combinations might cause a great deal of confusion, let alone dealing with homophones.

Struggling with reading speed

This may limit their ability to understand the text as a whole. Readers may need to develop their fluency and decoding abilities in order to increase their reading speed.

However, not all words do. Certain words are more difficult to figure out by phonetically decoding them. These are ambiguous terms and homophones that have several spellings with distinct meanings or are spelled differently than how you may say them.

To sum up, answering the question “how to decode words” basically gives a reply to another crucial question which is “how to read”. 

To discover even more useful advice on teaching young learners, join our community of inspiring professionals and get some helpful tips during the TEFL training.