Teachers can write several words that have the same vowel sounds but different spellings. This shows students how they can spell vowel sounds in different ways. For example, the words "do" and "due" have different vowels, but produce the same sound.
The key to having reading fluency and academic vocabulary is multi-syllable decoding and encoding. As students move into more advanced subjects, they will come across words that have multiple syllables, especially in their history and scientific texts. Teachers can give students these more complex words and have them break syllables down individually so that they can sound out the vowels. Teachers can have students practice many different examples of syllable patterns until they achieve a mastery of that pattern. For example, the teacher could have students break down the syllables of words like "ger-mi-nate" and "hi-ber-na-tion."
As they get older, students develop a very strong sight word vocabulary, which can prevent them from learning how changes in spelling affect pronunciation and syllabication. Sight word vocabulary refers to words that students can identify simply by recognizing the letter sequence, but cannot sound out. For example, students might recognize the word "growing" by remembering the arrangement of the letters. But they don't understand how the letters create the "grow" sound. So some students might not know how to pronounce the word "sowing" because they haven't seen the word before. But if they learned how to sound out the individual parts, they could pronounce words that they haven't seen before. Nonsense words prevent students from relying on a sight word vocabulary. Possible nonsense words are unlimited. They can include words like "weebfiss" and "ligfet." Teachers can have students respond as soon as they see a nonsense word. They must pronounce the syllable aloud. They carry this out very rapidly so that students have to develop fluency instead of relying on sight word vocabulary.
Teachers can help students decode words by breaking larger words into smaller parts so the students can more easily decode them. For example, the teacher could write "chromosome" as "chro-mo-some." Students must write how many syllables are in the word, finding the number of syllables by the number of vowel and consonant sounds. Students can take turns pronouncing each part of the word.
Teachers can also drill students on the rules regarding vowels. For example, when there are two consonants that come between two vowels in the word, divide the syllables between the consonants, such as with "bor-der" and "fod-der." When there is one constant between two vowels, divide the syllables after the first vowel, such as with "bo-nus" and "gla-cier."