A second-grade student reads familiar words but struggles with new words; what support would best help?

A second-grade student reads familiar words but struggles with new words; what support would best help?

• A. Print Awareness
• B. Memorization of High-Frequency Sight Words
• C. Decoding Skills
• D. Recognizing Common Letter Patterns

Answer: (C)

Focusing on decoding skills means teaching students to map letters to sounds, segment words into phonemes, and blend those sounds smoothly to read unfamiliar words. When a child can sound out parts of a word and then blend them, they don’t rely on memorized words alone and can tackle new text with confidence. In this scenario, where familiar word-reading is solid but new word-reading is weak, explicit decoding practice—working with phoneme-grapheme relationships, common patterns (like digraphs and vowel teams), and blending strategies—builds the transferable skill needed for reading more words across texts. While recognizing patterns and sight-word memorization have value, they don’t provide the same flexible toolkit for decoding unknown words as direct practice with phonics-based decoding does. Print concepts are helpful for overall reading, but they don’t address the specific challenge of decoding new words.

Focusing on decoding skills means teaching students to map letters to sounds, segment words into phonemes, and blend those sounds smoothly to read unfamiliar words. When a child can sound out parts of a word and then blend them, they don’t rely on memorized words alone and can tackle new text with confidence. In this scenario, where familiar word-reading is solid but new word-reading is weak, explicit decoding practice—working with phoneme-grapheme relationships, common patterns (like digraphs and vowel teams), and blending strategies—builds the transferable skill needed for reading more words across texts. While recognizing patterns and sight-word memorization have value, they don’t provide the same flexible toolkit for decoding unknown words as direct practice with phonics-based decoding does. Print concepts are helpful for overall reading, but they don’t address the specific challenge of decoding new words.