Revolutionizing How We Teach Reading: Reverse Direction Decoding

A New Approach to Decoding: Reverse Direction Decoding (RD2)

When facing a word that should be a longtime resident in our students’ collective word banks, why does reading fluency suddenly come to an abrupt halt? Students stutter and stammer through each successive syllable, decoding it in precisely the same unsuccessful manner that produced their initial pronunciation failure. Each encounter with that word sounds to an observer as if the student and it are making their first acquaintance.

Scientific terminology, medical terms and geologic jargon are intimidating if we rely on traditional decoding methods. Children are enamored with dinosaurs, but their parents and teachers often find themselves somewhat useless as resources when it comes to helping to pronounce lengthy dinosaur names. However, by deploying “reverse direction decoding” (RD2) a brain-considerate strategy, reading each word becomes significantly easier and faster. RD2 is an effective new reading strategy that quickly moves students from decoding words to reading for comprehension.

The first step in the RD2 process is breaking a word into its constituent syllables. Fortunately, there are only six major categories of syllabic patterns governing the English language (see chart: The Six Syllable Patterns for Learning English).

Here are the steps to reverse direction decoding:

1. Pre-read a paragraph, a small section of a book or a chapter.
2. Identify all unfamiliar words and difficult multisyllabic words.
3. Write them in a list form in one column.
4. Use the chart to divide those words into syllables in the second column.
5. Place your left thumb or a small rectangular piece of paper over all but the very last syllable of the word.
6. Pronounce the last syllable.
7.  Now, uncover the last two syllables and pronounce them in their proper order, beginning with the second-to-last syllable.
8. Reveal only one additional syllable at a time, moving toward the left and away from the very last syllable. Pronounce the last three syllables in their proper order; then pronounce the last four syllables in order, etc., until all syllables have been uncovered and read in order.
9. Read the complete word three or four times, until it no longer needs to be read completely in order to pronounce it entirely.
10. The word should be recognizable and should have moved into your “sight vocabulary.”

Practice your personal RD2 word list regularly.

Here is an example of applying RD2: “Diverticulitis” can be divided into the following syllables and patterns, which can be pronounced in the following order.

-tis
-li-tis
-u-li-tis
-tic-u-li-tis
-ver-tic-u-li-tis
di-ver-tic-u-li-tis

Upon hearing any new sound or syllable, it is remarkably easier for us to repeat or imitate that sound than it is to predict the syllable that might come next. The auditory cortex renders the human brain highly capable of imitating a language-sound that it has just uttered or just heard in a word, but the brain cannot accurately anticipate the next syllable in an unfamiliar word. Each new sound gets integrated with the sound that has just been heard, and each syllable “primes” the last-spoken syllable(s) directly out of working memory with ease, simultaneously strengthening the connections for saying the whole word. In their research, Drs. S. Jay Samuels, Nancy Schermer, and David Reinking concluded that only after a student can read words fluently can his or her attention focus on comprehension.

The Perisylvian Cortex

Attacking each arbitrary syllable in sequential order is difficult. However, by hearing the word-sound via auditory cortex, one can repeat what was heard within the past three to 10 seconds with ease. The perisylvian area of the brain is composed of the cortical real estate surrounding the sylvian fissure in the left hemisphere (peri- means “around,” and sylvian refers to its location, which is near the sylvian fissure). Collectively, these are among the primary centers in the brain that facilitate oral and written communication.

The eight brain areas associated with reading a new word include:

• Visual cortex: for seeing a word, syllable, or sound (providing our visual “cues” for producing the specific sound)
• Auditory cortex: for hearing a word (the sounds)
• Wernicke’s area: essential for understanding the meaning (semantics) of the word
• Prefrontal cortex: the brain’s executive command center that plans for articulating a particular word
• Pre-motor cortex: responsible for the physical aspects associated with preparing to say a word
• Motor cortex: permits the execution of voluntary motor functions for speech
• Broca’s area: orchestrates the mouth, tongue, lips, and jaw to “speak” a word
• The hippocampus: a subcortical structure responsible for laying down new memories essential for learning new words

To participate fully in the wide range of human language experiences, all areas of the perisylvian area must be fully developed. This region of the brain includes the phonological loop, which helps us hold and mentally rehearse verbal information.

There are two major components to the phonological loop. First is a phonological storage system, which is critical to our capacity for maintaining recent auditory information. For familiar speech-based language-sounds, it operates only for brief periods of time — approximately two seconds. After several seconds, those sounds quickly fall victim to forgetting (memory decay), unless they are immediately rehearsed or repeated (practiced). Delaying or preventing rehearsal results in word-sounds that are quickly discarded.

Second, the phonological loop recruits the hippocampus to assist with working memory for new words. The articulatory rehearsal component (from reading aloud) maintains a memory trace for recently processed speech-sounds. Memorizing sight-words is possible for the first thousand words or so; thereafter, new words require the RD2 strategy if they are to be effectively learned.