Have you heard of Set for Variability (SFV)? It’s a powerful tool which can transform the reading experience for learners.
I first heard this phrase at a British Dyslexia Association International Conference several years ago. Like many things in the world of teaching, it sounds more complicated than it is.
SFV takes place after phonemic assembly and involves the adjustment of the sounds of the target word to match a word in the reader’s lexicon (a word they know). The strategy is helpful when a reader has the skills to decode but the word they produce does not match the target word. I taught this explicitly to my son after I learnt about it and he said ‘Why has no one told me this before!? It may seem obvious but struggling readers often requite explicit instruction where a typical learner may do it automatically. This is because the reading process is much less effortful, therefore freeing them up to be flexible in their approaches.
How to apply SFV?
Ask the reader:
– does that sound right/make sense?
– what other sounds does that letter make?
– is there a word you know that sounds similar?
– if they are really struggling to assemble the sounds and apply the correct emphasis/stress and pronunciation, I tell then to look away from the word and retrive it from memory.
‘Studies have found that set for variability predicts the reading of irregular words (Tunmer & Chapman, 2012), regular words (Elbro, et al., 2012), and nonwords (Steacy et al., 2019). In these studies, set for variability was considered a general child attribute assessing cognitive flexibility for semantic cleanup by presenting children with spoken regularized pronunciations of irregular words (e.g., /wæsp/) and asking them to identify the real word (i.e., /wasp/)’. For the full article see here: The Role of Set For Variability in Irregular Word Reading
