1. CHUNKING Find out more on what it is and how it will help your child’s reading skills.

2. What is metacognition It is self-awareness and understanding about one’s own thinking processes

3. We must teach students to be active thinkers who have conversations in their heads with themselves while they read, not after. They must do this so they can make meaning and understand while reading. They must do this so they can problem solve and choose a fix-up strategy to use in the moment. (In this case, chunking to decode unknown words and eventually make meaning of parts of words.)

4. Why is Metacognition so important? We cannot do the reading for them. If WE are always directing the thinking cues then we are actually doing the thinking FOR them, and they will never become strategic. THIS is why students don’t internalize how to use strategies on their own, and why they never get past the guided practice stage of a strategy. Telling them what to think and when to think it, instead of carefully helping them OWN the thinking required to navigate through a strategy keeps them stuck!

5. What is chunking? A process for breaking down a larger word into smaller chunks, which is based on the brain’s natural recognition of patterns in words that are already known (blends, clusters, word families, etc.).

6. Do I need to call it “chunking”? YES! Students need to know that they are looking for “CHUNKS” of a word that they already know, based on patterns/parts they recognize from other words—chunks of word schema. “Chunking” is exactly what they are doing. Even though they will be recognizing word families, they are not “word family-ing.” Keep the term so the task makes sense to them, and matches the internal cues they will be learning to give themselves.

7. Chunking is MUCH MORE than a procedure. Chunking is a strategy… which becomes a learned skill… which becomes an automatic behavior… which then becomes a way for kids to move themselves on a long and unending continuum of life-long word study.

8. Chunking is beneficial for: Sounds and rhyming… Letters… Letter-sound… Onset/rimes… Blending… Word family chunks… Prefixes/suffixes/root words… Word derivation and morphology… Fluency… Overall comprehension of text…

9. What ISN’T chunking? Chunking is NOT the explicit teaching of phonics rules or syllabication. Chunking is NOT sounding words out.

10. Four Reasons Sounding Out Words Is an INEFFECTIVE Decoding Strategy : 1. Assuming a student is developing appropriately, sounding out words is only helpful until about the end of 1st grade. This is because those children are learning letter/sound correspondence, blending, onset and rime, and the concept of stringing individual sounds together… So… As letters start to behave differently (e.g. c+h= ch), students must adjust how they will decode a word in order to keep up with how words are changing.

11. Four Reasons Sounding Out Words Is an INEFFECTIVE Decoding Strategy : 2. Years of research on the visual processing of text have shown that specific, fixated eye movements (saccades) have a direct impact on how the brain processes what a word means. …The more eye movements (saccades) it takes to move through and read a word, the less the brain can think critically about its meaning. The fewer movements (saccades) there are, the easier it is for the brain to more quickly recognize the word, and allow for meaning-making. (Yatabe, Pickering, and McDonald, 2009) So…If we only teach students to sound words out one letter at a time, we are inherently teaching them to move as slowly as possible through a word, having many eye movements, therefore NOT allowing them to make meaning of the word. Chunking MATCHES what the brain needs to do to comprehend!

12. Four Reasons Sounding Out Words Is an INEFFECTIVE Decoding Strategy : 3. As words and text become structurally more complex and ideas within the content the text become more abstract and higher level, telling a child to “sound it out” actually INHIBITS their ability to read efficiently so that they CAN think critically… When readers see a word packed with meaning, which they have seen in context many times before (e.g. cafeteria, neighborhood, multiplication, etc.), the meaning of the word and the actual visual representation of the entire word, itself, become instantaneously linked and recognized. There is meaning in seeing the whole word. (Adams, 1990) Teaching students to rely on “sounding it out” prevents them from succeeding with the very vocabulary tasks we are expecting them to master. Sounding out words quickly becomes counterproductive. Often, it becomes detrimental.

13. Reasons Sounding Out Words Is an INEFFECTIVE Strategy for Decoding: 4.The more time one spends decoding a word, the more quickly the brain loses all comprehension of what it read PRIOR to that word, even if it was understood when it was read. This literally happens in seconds! The brain is not able to do both tasks at once. Whichever task is more cognitively taxing gets the priority. So when we tell a student to rely on “sounding it out,” we are creating constant opportunities for they to lose all meaning of the parts of the text they actually did understand.

14. Purpose for Chunking To teach students exactly what to do on their own when they get stuck on a word. To increase the amount and types of chunk patterns that their brains will recognize at a moment’s glance. This will ultimately make decoding easier and faster for them. To set the stage for acquisition of affixes and root/base words that hold meaning, which will impact fluency and comprehension. To remind students that we really chunk to help us understand the text, and that after we chunk a word, we always go back to the beginning of a sentence and REREAD so that we can understand all of what we read about.

15. What readers need to know about chunking: Good readers do NOT sound words out one letter and sound at a time. We need a new way to figure out unknown words. It’s called “CHUNKING.” Good readers look for patterns and relationships based on words they already know. “What chunks do you see that you already know?” One letter is not a chunk. We need at least two letters to make a chunk. The bigger the chunk, the better! The better we get at chunking, the quicker we’re going to see even bigger chunks!

16. What readers need to know about chunking: Good readers do NOT always find patterns in sequence from left to right. Sometimes we find them in the middle or the end, first! It doesn’t matter which chunks we see first, but we have to find them all, and we always have to put them back together in order from the first to the last chunks. That’s when order matters. Good readers can usually chunk up words in their heads, but not at first. We are going to start chunking by drawing lines so we can keep track of the chunks on our hands. Then eventually, we might not need to draw the lines, and we can just put a finger on the page instead of a line. Once we get really good at it, we can just do it in our heads! Hands-free!

17. What readers need to know about chunking: Chunking will help us figure out how to say words faster, so we won’t be stuck on them anymore! Sometimes we will have to play with chunks to figure out the sounds they make. Good readers ALWAYS REREAD FROM A SENTENCE’S BEGINNING after chunking up the unknown word!!! This is so we remember and understand what we were reading about. We have to ALWAYS go back and reread as soon as we reblend the chunks!!!

18. Cues/Prompts to Say to Kids to Help Them Chunk: “Which chunks/parts do I see/already know?” “Which patterns do I recognize?” “Now I have to fingerspell/put the chunks on my fingers and blend.” “I’m going to blend it a few times until it sounds right.” “I have to go back and reread so it makes sense!”

19. Questions Please contact me if you have any questions on this strategy. Michaelene.presutti@riversideschools.net This presentations was modified and originally from: © 2010 by Jackie Kerzner, M.A. Ed. Resources for Chunking