I hope no-one woke up feeling philogrobilised (seedy) this morning, although I’m sure there were a few of you who spent some time whindling (feigning groaning). However, gongoozling (staring idly at a water course) on this glorious morning makes it all worthwhile in your quest to quomodocunquize (making money anyway you can).
The Cracking the ABC programs do not teach these words, but they do give students the skills to be able to decode them.
The ability to quickly and accurately decode words is an important component of reading mastery. This skill requires you to be able to firstly recognise the sound(s) represented by different letters and letter combinations and then be able to blend those sounds into a meaningful word.
However, the limitations of working memory means that most people can only hold and manipulate 3 to 5 chunks of information. Given that many children with learning difficulties have poor working memory, they are probably are only going to be able to hold and manipulate 2 to 3 chunks at a time.
This means that once students are attempting to decode multisyllabic words, they need a process of breaking that word into manageable chunks. Traditionally, this has been achieved by having students break words into syllables. However, the problem is that the traditional rules for syllabification can be quite complex and there can often be exceptions to those rules requiring the word to be tweaked to pronounce it correctly.
As a beginning strategy, it can be useful to teach students a simple chunking strategy to reduce the load on working memory and thereby assist in the decoding of the word. Obviously, this system is still not going to be 100% effective due to the complexity of English, but it should provide a close enough representation of the word that the student is able to decipher the correct pronunciation of the word.
Once students have mastered this basic chunking strategy, then you can systematically and explicitly teach morphology, so they can use this knowledge both in the decoding process and in understanding the meaning of the word.
Click on this link for a video explaining the strategy and for a downloadable sheet explaining the basic strategy.