How would you help students who fail to use phonics and overuse context?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

To help students who fail to use phonics and overuse context, try the following:
• Make sure that materials are on an appropriate level of difficulty. Some students overuse context clues when they do not have the skills necessary to decode a large proportion of the unfamiliar words they encounter.
• Assess students with a phonics test such as the Phonics Inventory on p. 529 and/or take several running records or informal reading inventory samples of a student's oral reading. Note whether decoding skills are adequate. If not, work to improve weak skills and teach missing ones.
• Encourage wide reading of easy materials that contain target phonics skills. Poor readers often need extra practice in order for their skills to become automatic.
• Before students read a selection, review key phonics patterns that appear in the piece, so the students will be better prepared to use needed phonics skills.
• Review the phonics strategies for attacking unknown words. When students are stumped by a word, ask, "What can you do to help you figure out that word? Are there any parts that you can say? Is the word like any word that you know?"