May 26, 2024
Practicing Trip Words
While speed doesn't necessarily indicate reading fluency, a reasonable reading rate is expected as students progress. Reasonable reading rate looks like a child reading words correctly and with a smooth, consistent pace. Crucially, this pace must be fast enough to read fluently, but not too fast for comprehension. Slow, laborious, word-by-word reading is detrimental to comprehension and expression. Certain words, especially those with irregular constructions, can be tough to recognize, and this is where practice comes in. Practice enables skills to be performed more quickly and easily. Practicing trip words allows readers to become familiar with them, paving the way towards smoother, faster reading.
In school, children learn to read primarily through phonics instruction. In phonics instruction, children are taught to break words down into units of language, or individual sounds. These broken down sounds are connected to print letters, which is how children know what sounds to make when reading each letter (or combination of letters). Phonics instruction is a scientifically proven way of learning to decode, but it does not account for words and letter-sound combinations unique to the “rules” of phonics. Words that include these are often called “trick words,” “heart words,” or “exceptions”. These words are difficult to learn, can be challenging to commit to memory, and are often obstacles to obtaining complete fluency. Additionally, readers may struggle with words that are not “trick words”, but rather simply words that they struggle with. At Rally, we call these “trip words.” All readers are different, which means unique words can be challenging as they learn. When children miss these words repeatedly, consistent practice and reminders can help them overcome the challenge.s. Rally Reader is the perfect supported practice tool for children as they learn and practice trip words.
Rally tracks the words a reader struggles with and utilizes "trip words" for targeted practice. As a brief warm-up exercise, Rally presents these words as digital cue cards. Reading the cue cards preloads working memory with relevant information, affords valuable practice, and supports fluency. More practice and exposure with these trip words improves students' pronunciation and overall fluency.