Just a bit ago, I was asked by a parent of one of the students I tutor, who is also a teacher, how I would teach reading. Without hesitation I replied that I would start with the Six Syllable Types.
I read recently in an article by Keep Reading and Learning that “just under 50% of English Syllables are closed”. 50%!! ANd that is just ONE syllable type. When you teach children to decode the six syllable types, meaning whether the vowel is long or short or makes a special sound and what those special sounds are, you give them the tools to unlock the VAST majority of the words they will EVER encounter in reading.
Within the syllable types there are a few additional rules and sounds to teach. And outside of the syllable types there are things like broad vowel sounds, trigraphs, diphthongs and schwa to teach. Although, some consider the schwa to be a 7th syllable type.
But, when you teach the six syllable types you are still unlocking almost all English words and you are doing it essentially by teaching 6 rules. Once you teach these six rules to mastery you can sprinkle in a few more rules to help them with some “exceptions”.
Denise Eide, in her book, Uncovering the Logic of English, gives 31 rules that govern and explain all but less than 20 English words. We are often told that English is so hard to read and write because it is full of exceptions. And there are some exceptions. But, when you realize that there are less than 20 true exceptions to the rules that govern our language it becomes a lot more manageable and it can give struggling readers and writers hope that they too can find success and enjoyment in our language! 31 rules may seem like a lot, but when you compare that to the alternative of memorizing thousands of words, 31 becomes a much more manageable number and makes so much more sense.
So, to recap. I would always start by teaching children the six syllable types in teaching them to read (decode) and write/spell (encode) words. If you are asking yourself what the six syllable types are, here is a list of them. Closed, Open, Vowel Team, Silent E, R Controlled and Final Stable or Consonant-le Syllables. I would teach them in this order as well with the possible exception of switching Vowel Teams and Silent E. I will give a brief description of each syllable type below. You can also download my All About Syllables printable to give you a definition and examples at a glance.
Before we dive into each syllable type, I want to point out a few other things to keep in mind when teaching reading that may seem like things everyone knows, but are actually things that should be taught to learners prior to trying to read or spell words. Learners should be taught foundational facts like how many letters are in the alphabet (26), what kinds of letters (consonants and vowels), which letters are which, what makes a letter a vowel, and what kinds of sounds vowels make before you even talk about syllables and words.
For a letter to be a vowel it has to follow three rules. First, it has to have a sound that you have to open your mouth to make. Second, the sound must be able to be sung (made continually without stopping). And third, it must be able to be sung LOUDLY and quietly. If the sound of a letter floors all three of these rules then the letter gets to be a vowel. This is why I always call y a consonant. Its own sound cannot be sung, so I call it a consonant that sometimes makes a vowel sound.
Having students name all of the consonants in alphabetical order and all of the vowels in the same way as well as play games like you say a letter and they tell you the letter that comes next as quickly as they can without looking if possible, help to strengthen their knowledge of the alphabet and build their phonemic awareness which if one of the National Reading Panels five pillars of reading.
Once students can identify how many letters are in the alphabet, their sounds and type, then you can move onto defining a syllable regardless of type. I have my students work through a phonics catechism which is just a series of questions I ask and memorized answers they learn and provide. In that catechism we learn that a syllable is “a word or a part of a word with one sounded vowel”. Because you have to open your mouth to make a vowel sound you can place your hand under your chin. Then count how many times your chin moves when you say the word naturally. Your chin will move every time you make a vowel sound because you have to open your mouth and each vowel sound equals one syllable. Accurately counting syllables will again strengthen that pillar of Phonemic Awareness.
Now that your learner knows their letter sounds and types and what a syllable is, you are ready to start teaching them and practicing with each syllable type.
I always start with closed syllables because they are the simplest, although once you add in blends and/or digraphs (two letters that come together to make a new sound; ch, sh, ph, wh and th) closed syllables can become quite complex. You can give you emerging readers and writers practice with all of these using my Closed Syllable Picture Labeling Bundle. Also, remember that closed syllables account for about 50% of English syllables.
Simply put, and included in my Phonics Catechism, a closed syllable has “one vowel, ends in a consonant, and the vowel is short.” It does not matter what comes before the vowel ONLY what comes after it. So, at is a closed syllable even though it begins with a vowel because it ends with a consonant. So are cat, splat and splash!
The syllable type that I teach after closed is open. These two syllables are the simplest and learning them one after the other allows early readers to master the skills needed to unlock SO MANY words as well as the biggest reasons for when to use a short and when to use a long vowel sound.
An open syllable has “one vowel, ends in a vowel and the vowel is long. Words in this group are words like the, he, so, and go.
At this point, if you haven’t already, you should be separating your letter cards as you practice sounds into beginning sounds (letters like l, k, f and s that aren’t usually spelled by themselves as ending sounds), medial sounds (vowels), and ending sounds (letters like x, b, d, t, m, n that can be used at the end of words in by themselves) and practice blending. Then practice moving your reader back and forth between open and closed syllables by completely removing the ending consonant stack from time to time. This makes the syllable that is left open because it now ends in a vowel and the vowel has to be read with its long sound.
The next two syllable types are really interchangeable in my opinion. At this point it is about whichever one will allow your reader to access the most text. You can teach Silent E and then Vowel Teams or vice versa.
A Silent E Syllable has “two vowels, one is the e at the end that makes the other vowel long”. These are words like slide, date, note.This one is most often taught third in schools as a lot of levelized text includes silent e words. One activity I like to do when teaching this syllable type is to use a worksheet of words or notecards with closed syllable words like slid, cut, hat on them and then a card with an e on it and have students notice the difference in reading cut and cute, hid and hide, or rate and rate. This helps them start to notice this pattern as they encounter it in reading. One rule you may want to teach at this point if you haven’t already is that c says /s/ before an e, i or y. This is necessary for learners to correctly sound out words like ice, rice, mice, etc.
A Vowel Team Syllable has “two vowels TOGETHER; when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking and says its name”. The letter combinations I teach as vowel teams are ai and ay, ee and ea, oa and oe. The nice thing when helping learners spell these vowel teams is that with ai and ay as well as oa and oe is you can teach that USUALLY ai and oa are found in the initial and medial positions in words and ay and oe at the end. For ee and ea, I tell learners that ee is used most often and that the reason for the two different spellings of this sound is for the many homophones (words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and mean different things) that have the long e in them like peak and peek, see and sea, meat and meet. For these words I try to teach students clues that help with the spellings as they come to mind, for example you EAT mEAT, you use two eyes to sEE and pEEk, so they are spelled with two e’s.
The last two syllable types are the least seen, but still very helpful to learn about for both reading and spelling. They are R Controlled Syllables and Final Stable Syllables (also called Consonant-le Syllables).
An R Controlled Syllable “has one vowel followed directly by an r which makes the vowel make a special sound”. These are the combinations ar, er, ir, or and ur. Similar to the vowel teams two of these have helpful sounds that set them apart from the others and they are ar and or. Each of these have a unique sound that only they make. They can each make the /er/ sound at the end of a word in an unaccented syllable, but they are the only ones that say their specific unique sound of: ar = /ar/ and or = /or/. The tricky culprits within this syllable type are er, ir, and ur. All three of these say /er/ and can be found in all positions of words. Again as with the /ee/ sound, one of the reasons for the variant spellings of /er/ is for the purpose of differentiating between homophones like fur and fir as well as turn and tern.
The last syllable type I teach is Final Stable Syllables. A final stable syllable has “a consonant-le”. These syllables are the only syllable type that cannot be a full word on their own. They will always be the last syllable of a root word. There may be a word like handling that does not actually end in the c-le, but that is just because there is a suffix added to the end of the root/main word. Some of these syllables are fle, cle, dle, ble, gle. These words can have a closed syllable as in the word humble or an open syllable as in able come before them.
Some curriculums also will teach the schwa as a syllable type. I teach this more as a variant pronunciation of the vowel sounds than a separate syllable type. One reason to teach it as a syllable type is because the schwa sound depends on the accent of the syllable containing the vowel. So, these are the syllable types that I teach, the order I generally teach them and the main set of rules that I start with when teaching a child to read. I hope you find this post helpful. If you do, please share it with other parents and teachers who would enjoy and benefit from it as well.
