Understanding phonics and learning to sound out words is one way to help students decode while reading. While phonics is helpful, there are exceptions to nearly every rule, so it is only one of many strategies students should use. Common phonics generalizations include: when two consonants appear side by side in a word, only one is pronounced; when a word begins with kn, the k is silent; when there is only one vowel in a word, the vowel is usually short; when the vowel e appears at the end of a word, it is usually silent. Students may not understand explanations of these rules and will do better seeing examples of them often.
Chunking a word involves breaking it up into smaller pieces to help with understanding. Some students chunk by syllables and others chunk by affixes or recognizable portions of words. As students learn to pick out parts of a word that they recognize, the word becomes less foreign and builds confidence to help them use prior knowledge to figure out the meaning or a partial meaning of the word.
Like with chunking, teaching students to recognize word roots, prefixes and suffixes while reading helps them break down unfamiliar words. A student may not know what the word biology means, but with knowledge that "bio" means "life" and "ology" means "the study of," the student is able to figure out a general meaning of the word. Teaching students roots, prefixes and suffixes helps them recognize a larger variety of words than simply teaching students vocabulary one word at a time.
Students use the text surrounding the word to determine its meaning. Context clues appear in multiple ways. A text may provide a definition or synonym of the word in the same sentence. For example, "The Clydesdales are my favorite horses in the parade." Other texts provide antonyms of the word in the sentence or surrounding sentences. For example, "After the trip Billy was fatigued, but Joe was full of energy." Gist clues require students to make inferences based on the surrounding information. For example, "She was famished because she hadn't eaten all day."