After students have mastered breaking words apart by syllable, they move on to learning to segment words into individual sounds. Hearing the discrete sounds in words is the most advanced phonemic awareness skill. First, students practice this skill without seeing the word, and then they move on to activities where they can see the written word. As students build their letter-sound correspondence knowledge, they may be able to write the sounds in each word, too. This page includes intervention strategies that you can use to develop your student's understanding of segmenting. As you read, consider which of these interventions best align with your student's strengths and needs in the whole learner domains.
Explicit Instruction
If you are intervening to support your students' ability to segment words into sounds, you should start by explicitly teaching the skill. This sounds like:
Activity A: Sound Segmentation
Tell the student a word and ask him to stretch the sounds. As he says each sound, he will tap down his arm. "I'm going to say a word and then I will break the word into its sounds. Fin. Fffff (taps shoulder) iiiiii (taps elbow) nnnnn (taps wrist). Fin."
Sound Segmentation in Action
Watch this clip to see how to execute Sound Segmentation. Notice how the teacher incorporates Make it Move to make the intervention more effective. Implementation note: During reading intervention, it is recommended that the teacher prompt the student to repeat the original word before completing the segmentation task.
Activity B: Elkonin Boxes
An alternate activity to Sound Segmentation is the Elkonin Box (see below). Elkonin was a Russian psychologist who developed a method for students to segment the sounds they heard in words by using markers to indicate each sound. In this activity, students look at a picture (or a word) with a series of boxes below it. As they say each sound in the word, they point to its respective box. "What is this picture? That's right, it's a dog. As you say each sound in the word, point to a box."
Activity C: Stretched Segmenting
Tell the student that he will be using cubes to represent sounds in a word. "I'm going to say a word and then I am going to stretch out a word and push forward a cube for each sound that I hear. Ready? Fin ffff (push cube forward) iiii (push cube forward) nnnnn (push cube forward)."
Stretched Segmenting in Action
Watch this clip to see how to execute Stretched Segmenting.
Think about the following scenario, which takes place after a teacher has explicitly taught a lesson about how to segment a word into sounds:
Teacher: "Segment the word cup."
Student: "C-up. Cup has two sounds."
In such a case, what might you do?
When you are planning your lessons, you should anticipate that your student will make errors throughout the activity. Here are a series of prompts that you can use to respond to errors. Keep in mind that all students are different, and students respond differently to different types of feedback.
| Level of Support | Description of Scaffold | Script |
|---|---|---|
| Smallest scaffold | Try again! Allows student multiple opportunities to practice new skill. In this case, you are trying to determine whether the student needs to be retaught the skills (because he cannot hear the sounds) or if the student simply wasn't attending to the sounds as he segmented the word. Determining the reason for the error will allow you to make decisions regarding next steps. | "Let's have you try to segment cup again. Make sure to stretch each sound you hear." |
| Medium scaffold | Provide resources. Allows the student to use resources to figure out the answer (including helpful supports such as a picture, multisensory approaches, or specific prompts).
|
"Try segmenting the word cup again. You heard two sounds in the word, but there are three. Can you segment again and stretch each sound?" |
| Highest scaffold | Model, Lead, Test, Retest. Model for the student using this gradual release correction procedure adopted from Carnine, D.W., Silbert, J., Kame'enui, E. J. & Tarver, S. G. (2004). Direct instruction reading (4th Ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. | 1. Teacher says the correct answer. "C-U-P." 2. Teacher models: "My turn. Segment cup."(Signal.) "C-U-P." 3. Teacher leads: "Let's do it together. Segment cup" (Signal.)"C-U-P." (Teacher responds with the students.) 4. Teacher tests: "Your turn. Segment cup." (Signal.) "C-U-P." |
If your student struggles to meet your objective, there are various techniques that you might try, to adjust the activity to your student's needs.
| Activity | Description of strategy | Script |
|---|---|---|
| Sound SegmentationSound Segmentation | Make it move. Use multisensory approaches when segmenting syllables. Ask students to clap it out or tap it out. | "When I segment the word happy, I'm going to clap each syllable. Ready? Ha (clap) ppy (clap). Happy." |
| Shorten it! Give students shorter words to segment (two sounds instead of three). | "Let's try a shorter word. Clap out the sounds in the word 'silly.'" | |
| Repeat after me. Have students practice this task by repeating sounds in the words as you segment them. | "Let's do it together. I'll say the sounds and you'll repeat them after me. Ha." "Ha." "Ppy." "Ppy." | |
| Picture it. Show students a visual so they can refer back to it as they segment syllables and sounds. | "Here is a picture of ____. Use this as a reference as you segment the word." | |