Back-chaining

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Back-chaining is a useful technique in teaching oral language skills, specially with polysyllabic words. Suppose that you're teaching someone to pronounce the name ‘Mussorgsky’. First, you ask him to say the last syllable: -sky; then to repeat it with -sorg- attached before: -sorg-sky; and all that remains is the first syllable: Mus-sorg-sky.

This technique is easier than the front-chaining, starting with the first syllable, which requires that the student put the new element first where it's more difficult to forget. Back-chaining keeps the phonological structure of English better than front-chaining (normally there is no difference in stress between a word spoken in isolation and one spoken at the end of a sentence)^[1] and it's arguably better to start with the final syllable (main stress in bold):

Chaining sequences for the English word 'aroma':

(1) Front-chaining: [ə] - [ə.ɹəʊ] - [ə.ɹəʊ.mə]

(2) Back-chaining: [mə] - [ɹəʊ.mə] - [ə.ɹəʊ.mə]

Syllables tend to follow a stressed-unstressed pattern in English, example: happy (though there are many exceptions). The order -ma, -roma and aroma respects this. Starting with a- and aro- entails reversing this pattern, which complicates learning. Teachers could choose to present a chain as pairs of syllables too, beginning with -roma, then aroma: this introduces the strong-weak stress pattern from the outset.

[edit] Footnotes

^ Compare psychological in isolation, it's psychological and psychological profile, where only in the last does the main stress shift to another syllable.