Is Word Decoding Important?

Decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of letter-sound relationships, including knowledge of letter patterns, to correctly pronounce written words. Understanding these relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words they haven’t seen before. – Reading Rockets

If children can’t decode words then they can’t work their way effectively through increasingly harder texts. What happens then is that their frustration level rises and teachers and parents start seeing them struggle and fall behind. Comments like “I hate this” or “I can’t do this” start to become common place.

Decoding is the ability to read a single word in isolation even if the meaning of the word is not there. A later grade student should have skills to decode a word, no matter the size of the word.

Word decoding goes back to phonics, phonemes, and syllables and those things were taught to kids in early elementary school. So, a child struggling with 7th or 8th grade text and is just now having trouble with decoding is not going to want to start all over again with learning to decode words using “phonics”.

Unfortunately, that is what is needed to help the student be a successful reader. When I was working as a reading specialist, just after I got my Master’s Degree, I worked with many students who had this exact problem. I explicitly taught them how to decode words, taught them sight words that they never learned, and showed them how to teach themselves how to be successful.