Syllabication is the act of dividing words into syllables and can be described as a 'beat' or 'beats' within a word. As an example of syllabication, take the word 'fantastic'. Dividing it into beats gives us three clear syllables: fan/tas/tic.

More than 80% of words in English have more than one syllable. It is much easier to read a new, unfamiliar word in chunks than to try to sound out all the letters in one long, continuous string. Chunks are easier to hold on to than small, individual bits of information and reduce the cognitive load. A lighter cognitive load frees up working memory which is important because learning new skills requires a lot of working memory.

Opportunities for developing syllabication skills:

Syllabication is Reading Accuracy segmented into syllable and word types and is assessed when the educator indicates whether the student has read each word correctly during the word reading assessment.

In every assessment, there are 48 words of between 1 and 4 syllables covering regular, irregular and pseudowords.

The number of correctly read syllables will be shown against the total included in each category, providing the raw score.

The results are also colour coded as shown below:

green: all words were read correctly

yellow: between 1 and 3 words were read correctly

red: no words were read correctly