Vowel Clustering Works with Students Struggling in Reading By Elaine Clanton Harpine, Ph. D. Vowel clustering simply means to teach words by sounds rather than by letters. There are no rules to memorize, and students are never allowed to guess at a word. Vowel clustering teaches students to decode or break words down into individual letter sounds and then to encode or reassemble those sounds back into pronounceable words, to learn the meaning of the word, and to use the word correctly in a sentence. We call it the 4 Steps. My vowel clustering method also teaches spelling, handwriting, oral reading fluency, comprehension, and story writing. Vowel clustering has been tested and proven to work with struggling, at-risk, and failing students—all ages. A student, who failed for nine years using balanced literacy and phonics, learned to read in 3 ½ years using vowel clustering. I have even had struggling students move up four grade levels in one year using vowel clustering. These were students who had failed multiple years in schools that taught whole language, balanced literacy, and phonics.
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Teachers Making a Difference | Issue 6, January 2023
Why does vowel clustering work so well? Vowel clustering works with the brain. Memorization works against the brain, regardless of whether you are memorizing words from a word list or memorizing phonics rules. Struggling students typically have difficulty memorizing. So, how do we activate these brain circuits? By the way we teach letter-sound relationships.
Vowel clustering recognizes that vowels are the most important sounds for children learning to read and teaches all the sounds for a vowel in a cluster. With the letter a, the children learn all seven sounds used by letter a and the 22 different letter combinations that can be used to make those seven sounds. The traditional phonics approach was to teach the “short vowel sounds” and then the “long vowel sounds using silent e.” The other sounds were called “irregular