Helping Students With Dyslexia Read Long Words: Using Syllables and Morphemes

Students with dyslexia have great difficulty reading words with more than one syllable, polysyllabic words. This article describes efficient, “micro-evidence based practices” (Cook & Cook, 2013) to help students read these words. The strategies include: (a) identifying syllables in words using simple principles, (b) knowing different pronunciations of single-letter vowel sounds, (c) reading polysyllabic words using a flexible strategy, (d) practicing correcting mispronunciations, (e) practicing pronouncing affixes in words to mastery (f) reading words by identifying affixes and base words, and (g) reading words in morphological word families.