Learning to Read: Decoding Decodables

by Amber Miller

February 16, 2025

Decodable readers are books carefully crafted to align with the phonics patterns and rules students are learning. Unlike regular texts, which may contain irregular or advanced spelling patterns, decodable readers feature words that can be decoded using the phonics skills students have acquired. This controlled vocabulary empowers students to confidently apply their knowledge of letter-sound correspondences and decoding strategies in context. This approach to attending to all the letters in the words (instead of guessing or using context clues!) promotes orthographic mapping.

Why Decodables?

Reading words by attending to all letter-sound correspondences is how our brain learns to read efficiently. This is not a new science, and it is based on over 40 years of research. The science tells us that students must focus on the letter-sound correspondences (word reading) to decode. Students should not use context clues or pictures. Are pictures bad? No, they are a great way to check decoding and comprehension. However, we no longer encourage students to look at the picture to figure out the words.

What is the Science or Reading?

The science of reading has changed how we teach students how to read. The science of reading is a body of research that studies how children learn to read and write. It's based on research from many fields, including cognitive science, education, and neuroscience. The science of reading helps educators develop effective reading programs. Parents can and should be knowledgeable in the science of reading to support, reinforce, and accelerate their student's learning. The key components of the science of reading are:

Phonemic awareness

The ability to recognize that words are made up of sounds that can be blended together or broken apart.

Phonics

The knowledge of the relationship between sounds and letters.

Fluency

The ability to read quickly and smoothly.

Vocabulary

The knowledge of word meaning and how to use it in text.

Comprehension

The ability to understand what is read by using background knowledge, decoding skills, and critical thinking.

What are Decodable Books?

A decodable book focuses on one new grapheme, spelling pattern, or morphological unit. It uses a controlled set of vocabulary with spelling patterns and morphological units that have already been explicitly taught to the student.

A grapheme is a written symbol that represents a sound (phoneme). This can be a single letter or could be a sequence of letters, such as ai, sh, igh, tch, etc. So when a child says the sound /t/, this is a phoneme, but when they write the letter 't', this is a grapheme.

These are all the phonemes in the English language (and some of the graphemes used to represent them):

A spelling pattern is a way of organizing letters in words that share common letter sequences or sounds. Examples of spelling patterns:

Vowel-vowel-consonant-consonant (VVCC): Words like "each", "field", and "ground"

Vowel-vowel-consonant-silent “e” (VVCe): Words like "weave", "piece", and "leave"

Consonant digraphs: Two or more consonants that make one sound, like "th" in "this"

Consonant blends: Two or more consonants that make their individual sounds, like "st" in "stop"

Vowel teams: Two or more letters that make one vowel sound, like "ea" in "weak"

Vowel diphthongs: Two vowels that start with one sound and change to another within the same syllable, like "ow" in "cow"

R-controlled vowels: Vowels followed by "r", like "ar" in "car"

A morphological unit is a morpheme, the smallest unit of meaning in a word. Morphemes are the building blocks of language and are used to create new words and convey meaning.

Examples of morphemes

The word "cat" has one morpheme.

The word "cats" has two morphemes: "cat" and the suffix "-s".

The word "worker" has two morphemes: the root "work" and the suffix "-er".

Morpheme characteristics:

• Morphemes are spelled consistently, even if their pronunciation changes. For example, "child" and "children".

• Morphemes are situated between phonemes and syntactic structures.

• Morphemes are important for morphology because they make word forms that reflect grammatical relations.

Why Use Decodable Books?

Especially in the earlier stages of literacy instruction, decodable books require students to use their phonic decoding skills instead of guessing. While this reading approach has long been used for students with the Orton Gillingham approach and students with dyslexia, current research tells us that this is the correct reading approach for ALL students!

We TEACH reading in different ways; they LEARN to read proficiently in only one way. Teaching is what we do- learning is what their brains do.

~ Dr. David Kilpatrick

Reading decodable texts helps lead to orthographic mapping. Orthographic mapping is the long-term, efficient way that readers seemingly read “by sight.” But in fact, proficient readers do not use their visual memory at all for reading those words “by sight.” Instead, orthographic mapping builds the relationship between letters and sounds to bond the spellings and pronunciations of words in the most efficient manner. Once a word is correctly orthographically mapped, the reader does not have to laboriously decode it each time he encounters the word. Instead, the word becomes permanently stored (“mapped”) as sight words for future, instant recall. This improves fluency and allows the brain to focus on comprehending the text…the ultimate goal of reading!

What is the difference between a decodable book and a leveled reader?

Both types of books improve fluency, comprehension, and vocabulary. At some point, both types should be a part of a reader’s personal library. While a decodable book focuses on one phonic/spelling pattern, leveled books combine many phonetic patterns, sight words, and vocabulary. As the word knowledge, vocabulary, and sentence structure increase in difficulty, the level of the book increases. Depending on the difficulty of these components, publishers “level” the text accordingly. Some companies use letters A-Z and some use numbers to level, but they all increase in text difficulty. Leveled reading texts use the terms Independent, Instructional, and Frustration levels to assess a student’s reading ability within a level.

Teachers use leveled readers most effectively when used as part of a guided reading lesson and close teacher monitoring of student progress. For most students, using leveled readers is appropriate after the students have mastered many of the decodable reading strategies for orthographic mapping. Some may ask, “Why we should wait to use leveled readers when they are so engaging?” If we push too many skills at one time in a text, we encourage the student to guess at words. We don’t want them to use memorization, pictures, or context clues to read. We want them to use all of the letters from left to right to attack each word.

So, when students are learning to put sounds together to form simple words, encourage them to use decodable text. Instead of using those early leveled readers A-H for independent reading time, teachers can use them for read alouds to build background knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension. Then once the decoding skills are solid, introduce leveled readers. It’s not an either-or approach. But instead it is a balanced “diet” with decodables first and leveled readers introduced later.