What Are Syllables?Syllabication is the process of

analyzing the patterns of vowels and consonants in a word to determine where the word breaks into syllables. This enables readers and spellers to identify syllable types and their vowel sounds, recognize consonant diagraphs and blends, and thus arrive at an approximate pronunciation and spelling of the word.

Understanding SyllablesA syllable is a unit of pronunciation containing a single vowel sound. For students in second grade and beyond, knowing how to decode unfamiliar multisyllabic words is essential because most of the new words they will encounter in print are “big” words.

Research shows that when good readers encounter a long, unfamiliar word, they assign the word a pronunciation by chunking the letter patterns into manageable units. These units can be phonograms, prefixes, suffixes, and syllables.

PREFIXES & SUFFIXESJust as phonograms are useful chunks, prefixes and suffixes also help students recognize and pronounce multisyllabic words. To decode big words, students need to recognize common suffixed and prefixes, use as logical syllable breaks, and pronounce them as whole units. Most of the time, a prefix or a suffix will make its own syllable.