How do you pronounce the name of a new prescription drug if you've never heard it pronounced before?
If you're a good reader, chances are that you use the essentially the same technique that we teach in the OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method. What you don't do is apply the system known as the six-syllable approach that is taught in so many schools today. In fact, it's likely that you can't list even five of the six syllable types.
An Example
Take a drug like Alprazolam. As I write this, I've never heard it pronounced, but here's how proficient readers usually approach it:
First chunk is Al, pronounced like the name Al, because stopping at A would leave the lp together to start the next chunk, but we don't start words (or chunks) with lp. It's too hard to say. So you say Al and move to the next chunk.
Second chunk is pra, pronounced one of three ways, prah, pray, or pra (with a short-a). So we try prah on our first attempt.
Third chunk is zo, pronounced one of three ways, zah, zoe, or zoo. We might try zah first. So far, we have Al-prah-zah...
Fourth (last) chunk is lam, likely pronounced like the word lamb, so we go with that.
So, as a first attempt we have Al-prah-zah-lam. If we're then told that's not what the drug company chose, we start testing the other options. We might try Al-pra-zah-lam using a short-a sound in the second chunk.
Then there's the accented syllable(s) to consider. I keep putting the accent on the second chunk, whether it's prah or pra. So I personally get Al-PRAH-zah-lam on my first attempt.
And, finally, because we tend to pronounce vowel sounds in unaccented syllables with a schwa, or /u/ sound, I get Al-PRAH-zuh-lum
The Result (drum roll)
A search engine yields the pronunciation Al-PRA-zoe-LAM with both the second and last chunks carrying short-a sounds and accented. So my personal effort wasn't close to the pronunciation that the drug company decided to go with. However, they did choose from the options that I listed as possible choices.
Because Alprazolam was an invented name I'd never heard pronounced before, I had to use a search engine to get the actual pronunciation. With a real word, a young reader should do the same sort of testing, and eventually he will recognize an actual word in his listening vocabulary. In some cases, a word has two pronunciations, like contract (CON-tract, con-TRACT), and he will have to use context to decide which pronunciation is correct. Of course, the word he's decoding must also be in his listening vocabulary. He has to have heard it pronounced properly before. Otherwise, he will have to resort to a pronunciation guide, just as I did with alprazolam.
Moreover, because he's chunking the word and testing the vowel sounds (and sometimes an ambiguous consonant sound as well), it's likely that he will be building a good representation in his mind of the spelling of the word.
But We Don't Teach Kids to Approach Multisyllable Words That Way
Instead, many schools teach a more complicated, and less reliable, six-syllable strategy. Often morphology instruction is added to that where students learn the meaning and pronunciation of roots, prefixes, and suffixes. Since neither of these methods is a good fit for decoding an unfamiliar word, they tend not to be taught consistently, nor used by most students. That leaves guessing as their fall-back strategy.
I would wager that most teachers didn't know the six-syllable types when they learned to read, and morphology, while useful for determining meaning, tends to put the cart before the horse. Before addressing meaning, a student must first recognize the word he's putting meaning to.
Our OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method Teaches the Strategy Proficient Readers Use
A student is taught to proceed through an unfamiliar word one chunk at a time, stopping after each vowel sound. He is also taught to try a particular choice for each vowel spelling on the first attempt, a choice we call the First Vowel Sound. Failing to recognize a word, he then tries what he has been taught is the Second Vowel Sound, or even the Third Vowel Sound that vowel spellings like a and o have.
The method also teaches a Main Rule and Three Exceptions. The Main Rule is: Stop each chunk after the vowel sound and try the First Vowel Sound in each. Next, test other viable vowel sounds until a word is recognized. In doing so the student builds awareness of vowel spellings and of their alternative pronunciations such as the ow in grow and how, or the three possibilities of the letter o in the third chunk of in the example above.
Each of the Three Exceptions directs the student to remove a letter, or letters, from the beginning of the next chunk and tack it onto the preceding chunk. One exception moves doubled consonants. Another moves moves what we call markers, the letters x, ck, dg, and tch. The last exception breaks up illegal blends like pt, nd, and lp. In the case of all three exceptions, the letters moved don't normally appear at the beginning of words so the student has no trouble justifying moving them.
And this has a significant benefit. Usually, any re-formed chunks that a letter or letters is added onto then contains a short vowel sound. That means that the student need not test other options in those chunks and can systematically test options in the remaining chunks.
We have used this method with well over 100 students, all struggling with reading, in one-on-one lessons and it was easily adopted by most. More important, because it is so easy to learn and apply, many students quickly discarded their old standby, guessing, in favor of using the new method.
The OnTrack Reading Multisyllable Method is a free resource here on our website, but it is also an integral part of each of our core reading products, including a new resource we are currently testing, a beginning reading program for parents to use with a young child who is ready to learn to read.
