Chapter 1
Phonological and Phonemic Awareness and Emergent Literacy
Course: Elementary Education Multiple Subjects 7001
Subject: Elementary Education Teaching Reading Subtest 7002
Chapter: Phonics And Decoding
1. Overview
Irregularly spelled or non-decodable words are words that do not follow predictable phonics rules. As a result, they cannot be decoded entirely by applying phoneme-grapheme correspondence. These words are often high-frequency words that occur frequently in early reading texts and require special instructional attention.
For example, words like "was," "the," "though," "listen," and "once" contain irregular spelling patterns. The graphemes in these words do not correspond to the phonemes in expected ways. In "was," the "a" does not make its typical short or long vowel sound. In "listen," the "t" is silent, and in "though," several letters do not match their expected sounds at all.
To support students in learning these words, teachers should use multisensory instruction, which activates multiple areas of the brain and helps build stronger neural connections for both visual recognition and spelling recall.