Short background of research:

• Educators participating in the study would involve explicit instruction of one of the program’s four strategies in their lesson, which focused on the students identifying isolated words and words in sentences.

Strategy 1: Word Identification by Analogy

• Encourage your students to think of analogies that use the rhyming patterns of words.
• This teaches your students to compare an unfamiliar word to a familiar one.

Strategy 2: Attempting Variable Vowel Pronunciation

• Emphasize the importance of flexibility in word identification. For example, vowels can have different pronunciations based on the context of the word.

Strategy 3: Seek the Part of the Word You Know

• When encountering a longer word, have your students look for a word or parts of words that are more easily identified.

Strategy 4: Peeling Off

• Have your students remove or “peel off” the affixes (prefixes and suffixes) of multisyllabic words, reducing them to shorter and more easily identifiable words

Explicit instruction is vital here. For more details and examples, visit the original source listed below.

Original Source:

Julie Myre-Bisaillon, Annick Tremblay-Bouchard, Véronique Parent, Carole Boudreau and Anne Rodrigue, LD @ School, "WIST Program: A strategy to improve orthographic memory in students with reading disabilities": https://www.ldatschool.ca/wist-program/