Correct Response: B. Virtually all irregular words contain elements that follow regular phonics guidelines. For example, in the irregular words many and said, only the vowel sounds are irregular. Teaching beginning readers to notice the regular (decodable) elements in a word provides them with an important scaffold for recognizing the word. A and D are incorrect because they are not efficient strategies. These strategies would have students ignore all the knowledge about letter sounds that they have already acquired and instead memorize the letter sequence (A) or shape (D) of each irregular word separately. C is also incorrect because context should be taught as a strategy for verifying the meaning of a word once it has been decoded, not as a stand-alone decoding strategy.
