After I wrote the post about the syllable types, I realized that if that was completely new information then you might need information about how to syllabicate words. So, today I am going top talk a little bit about how to syllabicate words and the purpose of doing so. When I went through my trainings with Brainspring on syllabication they would say that the purpose of syllabication was to get close enough to pronounce the word correctly. What that meant was that breaking the word down through their syllabication processes would get you close enough to pronounce/read the word, but may not match a dictionary’s syllabication. In this post I am not going to include all of the details of their program, I am certainly not qualified to teach all that they offer. I just want to give you an overview of how to syllabicate words and the purposes it serves.
First, similar to the syllable types there are syllable pattern types. There are 3 types. There are vccv (vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel), vcv (vowel, consonant, vowel), and vv (vowel, vowel). Also, before we talk about the three types, I want to mention that you will only use syllabication with multisyllabic words. You can find most of the syllable types in one syllable words as I mentioned in the Syllable Type posts, but you don’t need to syllabicate unless there are two or more syllables in a word.
The easiest way to syllabicate is to find the first 2 vowels and then you have to look between the vowels to see how many consonants are between. We will talk about the three different syllable pattern types, now.
- Vowel, consonant, consonant, vowel
The first thing to do is to find the first two vowels. You need to remember that there are some times when vowels go together with another letter and count as a consonant like with qu. Also, when two vowels are together and they count as one vowel like vowel teams, ee, ea, ue, ie, oe. If there are two consonants between the vowels then the word would be divided between the two consonants. An example of this pattern would be better, bet (closed syllable) ter (r controlled syllable). Sometimes there will be three consonants between the vowels, but will always have a blend that should be treated like one consonant. This is the case for words like constrain. In this word you would actually group s, t, and r together and count it as one consonant. So the first syllable would be con (closed syllable) and the second syllable would be strain (vowel team syllable)
2. Vowel, consonant, vowel
This kind of syllable pattern has two options for where to break the word. You should always try before the consonant first. That will leave you with an open syllable as the first syllable and thereby a long vowel sound in that syllable. An example of this would be raven, ra (open syllable) and ven (closed syllable). If that pronunciation is incorrect than you should move the break to behind the consonant to provide a closed syllable and thereby a short vowel sound in that syllable. An example of this would be cabin, cab-closed syllable and in-closed syllable. That should then give you the correct pronunciation. There are only a few reasons why it might not. One is a schwa syllable type. An example of that exception is the word banana. I went over that word in this Syllable Types, Part 2 post.
3. Vowel, vowel
The last syllable pattern type is vowel, vowel. This is where there are two vowels side by side, but they are not a vowel team or a diphthong. Each vowel in this scenario is a sounded vowel and thereby fall into their own syllables. The first one would be open and thereby have a long vowel sound and the second syllable would depend on what if anything comes after the second vowel. An example of this type of syllable pattern is the word eon. The syllables break down to e (long syllable) and on (short syllable).
These are the three types of syllabication patterns. The point of doing syllabication is to help decode (read) unknown multisyllabic words. When words get this long it is no longer effective to sound out words as a whole. It becomes nearly impossible to keep all of those sounds in mind by the time you get to the end of a 7, 8 or 9 letter word. Also, as words get longer and multiple different syllable types are combined, the vowel sounds change and it is necessary to know what type of syllable you are looking at to determine which vowel sound to use.
These are the three syllable patterns to look for when syllabicating and how to divide each one. This is also some of the reasons for using syllabication in decoding. It is like learning to count by 2’s or 5’s instead of 1’s. Now you only have to read a few chunks instead of 7 or more individual sounds to decode the word. Counting by 10’s is like using roots to decode words. We will talk about that in a later post. I recommend some teaching on each of these patterns in isolation to familiarize readers with the process. But, I would teach the majority of this as “real life” unknown, multisyllabic words come up in reading.
Let me know how this information helps you. I am planning to do another post on syllabicating that shows each step of the process.
