Syllables? Syllable Rules for PLD Encoding & Decoding Lists and Specifically for Spelling?

As students progress beyond simple text, they must learn to read and spell multisyllabic words quickly and accurately.

To read and spell these big words, it helps if students have an understanding of how syllables and morphemes work within words.

What are syllables and why are they useful?
A syllable is the sound unit within a flow of speech. It differs to a phoneme, which is a single unit of sound, as a syllable is a sound chunk that may be made up of several sounds.

Knowledge of syllable types can help students with a visual or organisational tool to help them decode and pronounce unknown words and improve reading skills.

There are different views on syllable segmentation
There is a difference between syllabifying when decoding and when encoding. Oral syllable segmentation also produces different boundaries. Hence there are 3 ways to syllabify words; orally, for readign and for spelling.

Below are the functional syllable segmentation rules that assist the process os spellign stage 3, 4, 5 and 6 words.

Types of Syllables
As 75% of all syllables in English are either open or closed syllables, PLD starts with teaching these syllable types.

Once students understand the open and closed syllable types, they can practice in longer multisyllabic words, such as napkin, table, donut and concave.

The next most important syllable to teach is the Schwa syllable. The easiest way to teach this syllable is to teach them as units (-le, tion, sion, ture, cious).

The remaining syllable types tend to be less common and are usually learned well during single syllable instruction and therefore require minimal additional practice.

PLD's Approach to Spelling Syllable Segmentation:

Updated on: 20/07/2023