Helping Students Read Multisyllabic Words with Devin Kearns

Episode Transcript
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Lori (00:01):
We've heard this from many of you your students are doing
well reading single-syllablewords, but now they're moving to
more difficult texts withmulti-syllabic words and they're
getting stuck, especially whenthe patterns aren't predictable.

Melissa (00:16):
If that sounds familiar , you are going to love this
episode.
Researcher and professor DevinKearns is here to break down
what the research really saysabout teaching students to read
longer words and how to helpyour students tackle them.

Lori (00:33):
Hi teacher friends.
I'm Lori and I'm Melissa.
We are two educators who wantthe best for all kids, and we
know you do too.

Melissa (00:42):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.

Lori (00:47):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how to
teach reading and writing.

Melissa (00:53):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.

Lori (00:59):
Hi Devin, Welcome to the podcast.

Devin Kearns (01:02):
Thank you for having me so excited to be with
you.

Lori (01:05):
Yeah, we've been waiting for a long time to have you on,
so thank you for being here.

Melissa (01:08):
That is true, that is true.
All right, so we're going tojump right in with some tough
questions for you.
But we really wanted to thinkabout.
We know we always hear thatstudents around like third grade
.
It's always third grade thatstudents start to hit.
You know they move from singlesyllable words and reading those
to reading these multi-syllabicwords and sometimes they like

(01:31):
hit this wall.
And so we want to hear from you, like you're an expert on
reading multi-syllabic words orpoly-syllabic words.
So why is it that studentsoften hit this wall?

Yeah, so why did it hit this wall?
Yeah, so why do they hit thiswall?
Well, a lot changes about thelong words.
One thing that changes is thatthey are almost all polysyllabic
words have a schwa sound.
Right, so that is without.
That's not true for likecompound words, but most words
in English are complex.
They have more than onemorpheme and in any word that

(02:06):
has more than one syllableyou're going to have a schwa
sound.
It's like an about, right, it'snot about.
It's not a about, it's about,and that's something we have to
do on every single word.
So if you aren't sure what todo, then with these schwa sounds
you don't really recognize that.
That's important.
It becomes really challengingwith these schwa sounds.

Melissa (02:24):
you don't really recognize that.
That's important.
It becomes really challengingand we've just taught students
all the short vowel sounds, longvowel sounds, and then we are
throwing this whole other soundin there.
Oh right, exactly.

And this thing happens where the single letter
vowels like A and razor now havea long sound, and that's not
something that they learnedbefore, typically right.
So now you have to deal withthe fact that, like oh, these
single letter vowels havemultiple pronunciations and that
combination of factors makesreading these long words really

(02:55):
challenging.
And after first grade thenumber of words of more than one
syllable increases reallydramatically through middle
school.
So it's a problem that happensbecause the words get harder and
get longer and students have todeal with those.

Melissa (03:10):
I think I heard you say the majority of words and texts
are multisyllabic, like once weget past those early grade
levels.
Is that right?

After first grade, more than 50% of the new words
we encounter have more than onesyllable.

Lori (03:23):
And I imagine there's just a lot of opportunity for things
to go wrong as you're soundingout those multi-syllabic words,
because there's lots ofdifferent parts of them that
could have different sounds, andso, as you're trying to put it
together, you really have tohave some sort of idea of what
the word is in your brain, right?
You've had to have heard theword before so you can put it

(03:44):
together, and then that bringsin a whole bunch of other things
that we could talk aboutprobably for hours, right, in
terms of knowing the words andhaving some sort of knowledge of
those words.

Yeah, absolutely.
So that's kind of the key ideais that, like we're always
looking for like a reference inour you know the term I always
found really challenging ourmental lexicon, right, our
personal dictionary of words.
So one of the things thatpeople do when they're reading a
word is they're scanning theirbrain as they're pronouncing it.
So you're like is there a wordin my mental dictionary that

(04:17):
works this way or similar tothis?
And this is really important.
When you get to a word like abow and you say a bow, you
search your kind of mental,actually your personal
dictionary, and say do I know aword like this?
And you're like, oh, one that'sreally close, is about right.
And so we have to, we make thatadjustment because it's going,

(04:37):
it's a slightly differentpronunciation but it's close
enough that when we have thoseskills of reading long words, it
actually isn't that difficultfor you.
And it's also why phonologicalawareness is really essential,
because with phonologicalawareness what we're doing is
that allows us to make the wrongthing into the right thing,
right.
And the examples I like to giveare things like the word cotton,
right?
So if you say the syllables incotton, cot-ton, like the t

(05:02):
sound is not in the word cotton.
The sound is in the word cotton.
It's a glottal, stop right.
It's this other really random,like little sound, and so you
need to make this mentalmanipulation to turn you know
the sounds into that and that'swhat you know.
Some readers find really easyand other readers find really
hard.

Lori (05:21):
Okay, You're saying something Devin that when I was
teaching second grade and at theend you know, when you're
starting to get into thosemultisyllabic words or
polysyllabic words in secondgrade or at the end of the year,
I would have a word like thatand I would not want to be
teaching it wrong, Right.
So there'd be like a word likecotton and I'm like oh, I don't,
I don't know where to to.

(05:42):
Even if I could take a goodguess about where to break it
syllable wise, I still wasn'tquite sure how to say it because
it didn't have those sounds,and so it was always really
tricky as a teacher to try tofigure this out.

Yeah, yeah.
So I even get the example oflike the word fan Right Like I.
There's a time when I startedto worry like should I even
teach a word like fan, becauseF-A-N doesn't make fan.
Like fan has a nasalized vowelright.
That S is actually A-N.
Sorry it sounds bad, but sothat sound of the A has been

(06:17):
shifted right Because it's nextto a nasal sound, like the N
sound.
And so I for a time was likemaybe I shouldn't teach these
words for the same reason.
I was like worried that I waslike almost doing harm by being
it's cotton and we have to turnit into cotton.
And then what I realized laterwas actually that's exactly what
I need kids to learn, that'sexactly what I need to teach

(06:39):
them because they need to dothis mental manipulation right.
There's always going to be thisneed to change the wrong thing
into the right thing, and that's, I mean, that's how we have to
do it, because we're trying tofind that, you know, entry in
our mental dictionary and thisis what we do when we sort of
encounter something that caughttime.

(07:00):
We've got to get kids to dothat, and that's going to happen
through a lot of practice.

Lori (07:05):
That's really helpful.
I it actually feels great as ateacher to know that that's what
we want them to do.
We want them to see it, have arecognition, and then be like oh
, cot ton is not a word that I'mfamiliar, oh, it's cotton.
Oh, okay, now that sound can bewhatever.
I don't even know what you said.
It was Okay.
So I want to talk a little bitmore about you know, something

(07:26):
that I think might be consideredcontroversial.
We've we've, you know, heardyou talk about it before, um,
but I think it's reallyimportant because it's something
I've always been a little bitskeptical about, um.
When I uh was in Baltimore city,we had to get trained, um for a
program that had studentsidentify syllable division rules

(07:48):
, right, so closed syllables,open syllables, and they had to
like, mark up these words awhole lot.
And again, maybe I'm likesounding very type A on this
podcast today, but I was verynervous that I was going to
teach them incorrectly because Ihad not learned these rules.
So it was all new to me.
I was learning them, um, andthey were requiring the position

(08:10):
that I was in in in the city tobecome a trainer.
So I'm like, oh my God, now, notonly do I have to teach
students and like teach theselessons and practice, but I also
have to teach teachers, um, butthe thing that I struggled with
was I wasn't sure if these, youknow, these division rules were
actually helpful for studentsto be able to read.

(08:30):
It felt like a lot of mentalload, like cognitive load, to be
able to do all this stuff tothe word rather than just like
actually attack it and read it.
But I know, like you've sharedthat in the research that you've
done, the rules aren'tconsistent and there are a lot
of exceptions, and so I thinkthat also added to, you know,

(08:51):
the apprehension that I wasfeeling.
So I'm wondering if you canshare about what your research
found about like the consistencyor inconsistency of the
syllable division rules.

Yeah, definitely.
So the study that I did wasactually an analysis of words,
not of kids, and so what I didwas to look at like over 10,000
English words that were commonin grades one through five, and
I found words that had eitherthe VCCV pattern or the VCV
pattern.
And for those who don't knowwhat I'm talking about, I mean,

(09:21):
so you know, everyone here is aliteracy person, but I'll just
say it for people who are lessliteracy, you know, familiar,
maybe don't know about these, soanyway.
So the VCCV means vowel,constant, constant vowel, a word
like rabbit, a-b-b-i, and avowel constant vowel word is a
word like tiger, i-g-e, and youcan also have V?

(09:42):
V like lion, I O, right, so,but let's not focus on that one
for now.
We'll focus on the other ones.
Yeah, so, and like you, likebeing really like wanting to do
it the right way and also likewhen someone explained to me
that there's a pattern here, Iwas like super excited because,
like I didn't think there was apattern, right.

(10:03):
So someone explained to me,when you have a VCV pattern, if
you break the word into partsand you end the first vowel, the
first syllable of the vowel,that vowel says the long sound,
right, it says I, and so thenstudents can know that's tie.
And then ger and you put ittogether and make tiger.
And I was like so excitedbecause I felt like before that

(10:26):
I didn't have like a way to givekids access to that kind of
thing and so I felt like thisimmediate sort of like
excitement about it.
But, like you, I was worriedthat I started to like wonder
like does this work all the time?
Cause you think about words likeyou know, linen or something,
and dragon, and it's like thosedon't work right, like you have

(10:47):
the VCV pattern, but in linenthat I says the short sound and
dragon the A says the shortsound, I started to wonder, like
how good is this?
And so when I did the analysis,basically what I found is that
for two syllable words right,just words of two syllables.
Just often when we teach kidswith these two-syllable words,
right, just words with twosyllables, just often when we
teach kids with these.

(11:07):
And it works about half thetime with E.
So, in other words, half thewords that have the E sound have
the long sound when they havethe VCV pattern and half the
words have the short sound whenthey have the VCV pattern.
Right, and that's notaccounting for the schwa sound,
which, for E, is actually themajority.
Okay, so we're just talkingabout the long and the short,
forgetting about that.
And so for the other vowelsit's better, like A is pretty

(11:30):
good and I is pretty good, o isvery good, o is the best one,
and then you know you and Y areokay and so, but they're not
very frequent and so.
So basically, what I concludedis and so that was two syllable
words right.
When you get past that, it'sreally bad, right?
So?
these are things are likeworking like less than a third

(11:51):
of the time, uh, because, uh,when you account for the schwa
sound, because there are so manyof those, and that made me
think, if we're going to teachkids something about how to
break words into parts, maybethis is not exactly the best use
of time, for the reason youalso said, which is it's a lot
of.
There's a lot of cognitiveeffort that goes into

(12:14):
pronouncing, like you know,doing this work right, because
we will teach kids, like thispattern is VCV, you divide it
after the V.
You need a way to remember that.
So you mark it up, you mark theVs's, you draw the line, and
then we teach kids like themacron, right, the little line
across the top that says it's along sound, or the bread which
looks like the smiley face, andyou know, and you teach kids

(12:35):
like those, you might not saythe names, but you teach them
that, like those are associatedwith those sounds, so kids will
remember it and so that you know.
So I just started to realize,like, in addition to the fact
that these aren, and so that youknow.
So I just started to realize,like, in addition to the fact
that these aren't thatconsistent, that's a lot of yes,
cognitive load for kids, andthat's even when they're just
reading one word.
What do you do when you're likein print, right You're?

(12:56):
You know it's hard to be likelet me stop, let me go over here
on a little worksheet and likewrite it out and then come back
Right and you could do that butthat's not necessarily going to
get you where you need to go.
At least that is the theory.
I will say that the VCCV ruleis much more consistent, so, and
that one does work a littlebetter even for longer words.

(13:17):
We don't have as many of thoseas longer words.
Right, we start to get rid ofthose, those doubles a lot of
times in the longer words.
But when you have that you canrely on that.
First one usually say the shortsound or the schwa sound, but
it does say the short sound alot.
But you know a lot of.
You know we would teach kids iswe're teaching them that VCV
because we need them to realizewhen that single letter vowel

(13:40):
makes the long sound, becausethat's not what they expect.

Melissa (13:43):
So interesting and you made me think when you were
talking about the VCVspecifically.
What like?
If it works, you know, majorityof the time for a lot of the
vowels but not so much for E butfor a lot of them it kind of
works.
But then when you get past thetwo syllable words, it's almost
like it works for them for alittle bit when they are just
moving up from one syllable totwo syllable, but then it kind

(14:04):
of probably all falls apartafter that.

It falls apart, right, yeah, and I think that's
the tricky thing about it, right, is like.
So if you have this sort ofspace where they don't work that
well and you know for thelonger words, and there's this
massive cognitive load, like youstart to worry.
Like you know what's, what arewe doing to the kids, I started
to worry this is like heresy tosay this, but like I started to

(14:28):
worry.
It's as bad as like theguessing strategy in terms of
time, right, so, like with thelike, you know, when I didn't
know about how to teach reading,like I'd have kids, like for 25
seconds, try to figure it outand use their strategies, right,
and like the kids wouldsometimes be silent because they
don't know what to do.
And so, and they're, they'retrying to work through this,
like a list of nine strategiesor whatever they're using, you

(14:50):
know, the the little animalskind of strategies or whatever,
right, um, and so they, you knowthey're in that same kind of
cognitive space of like takingthemselves entirely out of the
word doing something.
You know, that's like thisextra kind of exercise and then
coming back to the word, andthat's the worry we all had
about, like the context-basedstrategies and the guessing you

(15:12):
know, and using these strategiesthat we were not focusing
enough on.
You know actual reading.
We were taking them out of thatand I worried a little bit.
This is going to be a problemhere too.
Yeah, and I worried a littlebit.

Lori (15:23):
This is going to be a problem here too.
Yeah, and there's so much likeenergy that goes into breaking
it all apart or I don't evenknow what to call it, like
dividing the syllables andthinking about the rules and
then doing all the things thatby the time you actually get to
the part where you sound out theword, I feel like you've done
so much at that point that Ijust don't I wonder about the

(15:45):
efficacy of using thosestrategies to do that.
And that's where you know Ikind of broke down, so I
appreciate you explaining likeoh, you know that there are, you
know, some hesitancies aroundthat, for good reason, with the
word.
So I appreciate that.

Yeah, yeah.
So I appreciate that.
Yeah, yeah, you know, and itmakes me think too that when I
was, when we did a paper on thisfor the readingly journal, my
colleagues and I we were lookingat even for the CCV rule, there
were like one of these programshas like six backup strategies,
because sometimes you have likea CK Right, you have like it's
like well, now you can't divideit between the C and the k

(16:23):
because that's a digraph andthey had all these kind of like
backup things.
So it's like you have thatcognitive load on top of
everything else and it just itfeels like a lot and maybe it's
not a good use of time, but butyou know, but the so all that
like this is the worst thingthat I have to talk about, or
like talk about because, likepeople hate when I say that so
much and you know, you know, andso I won't, if you don't mind,

(16:45):
I want to say a couple of thingsabout that.
For people who are like already, like this is the worst podcast
episode.

Lori (16:51):
No, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it and
also then kind of be like hey,like we're talking about this
because it's important, right,Because research is kind of
showing it.
So I appreciate you extendingyour, uh, your thoughts here.

Yeah, okay, well, good, well, I appreciate that,
you appreciate it.
So.
So I think that you know thereare programs that include
syllable division that haveevidence of efficacy, meaning
that if you look at studies ofthose programs, they have
positive effects, and I'mcertain that many teachers have
used those strategies with kidsand kids have profited from
those strategies and it hashelped their literacy, right.
I have no doubt that that'strue, because it's something

(17:32):
that does work sometimes.
But what I also say is thatthere are know if you did sort
of a different type of strategyor taught about syllables in a
different way because I'm notsaying don't teach about

(17:52):
syllables, let's be really clear.
I'm not saying we should justguess, but if I taught this in a
different way, could I get atleast the same results or maybe
better ones, right?
So it's not about saying thatthis is terrible, but that's not
.
My endeavor here is to say thatwe shouldn't do anything or
anything like that.
I believe in evidence and youknow, and when we think about

(18:12):
actual studies of studentbehavior, student performance,
what we find is that programsthat use them have positive
effects and programs that don'thave positive effects, that
don't have positive effects,right, and so it's not possible
to say this is a totally badidea, but it's not supported by
the idea that when you look atwords, kids are going to
encounter that it's going towork.
And then there's this cognitiveoverhead piece and there's

(18:32):
never been a study that showedthat, like specifically doing
syllable division has likereally positive effects compared
to using a different strategy.

Melissa (18:40):
Yeah, I'm really glad you said that.
That's exactly what I was goingto ask you next, because I you
know that programs have it, havesyllable types and syllable
division, but also I meanstandards.
Do curriculum evaluation toolsdo right?
It is really embedded withinour literacy world.
So it'd be really, it would bereally tough for people to hear

(19:00):
you say stop teaching syllablesaltogether.

Yeah, so you know when we're talking about reading
the polysyllabic ormultisyllabic words.
I want to be really clear thatyou can use good strategies for
doing that, and there are acouple of things that are
effective that acknowledge theimportance of patterns inside
syllables.
That, for example, it's truethat a single letter vowel make

(19:26):
the long sound or the shortsound and sometimes the schwa,
but it's useful to teachstudents about that idea because
they will encounter a lot ofwords like that.
You know the majority of wordshave one or those two sounds
right, and so it is reallyimportant to teach something
about that.
It's just that question like,how much do we teach about the
actual division of the wordusing these particular rules?

(19:47):
And so, yeah, so it's.
I'm not saying don't teachanything about syllables.
It's also true that, like youknow, it is in standards because
, though a lot of those likecame along at the time that I
still use them and like taughtthem and like included them in
programs because, you know thatwas new to me and also seemed
really logical.
Like you know, I saw words forthe first time and there were,

(20:10):
you know, programs that hadevidence, effectiveness, that
you know.
Like people thought like weshould put this into these
standards, right, and so.
So I like, I acknowledge thatand, you know, I think it would
be good if it were sayingsomething about like a syllable
based strategy and notnecessarily like syllable
division.
But you know, like it is whatit is.

Melissa (20:34):
And I wonder too, if it's more like you've got me
thinking about this idea of justthe language shifting slightly,
to like this idea of a rulethat when I say a rule, that
makes me feel like it can't bebroken right, like it's
something that will alwayshappen.
So when you're talking aboutthe, you know the long vowels
and the short vowels and in thedifferent syllables, like it's

(20:57):
always the same, but it's notalways the same.
So maybe it's just a shift inlike.
I think you use the wordpattern, right, like maybe it's
less of a rule, more of apattern, something that you see
and you're what did you?
You refer to the Englishlanguage as quasi-regular.
Is that right?
Is that the right word?

It is yes, yeah, mark Seidenberg likes that word
too.
Yeah, yeah, so right, I mean,that's the thing.
So English, listen, you've gotEnglish has.
One of our colleagues, charlesPerfetti, says like exemplary
regularities is the term that heuses Like a lot of things do
work, okay, but English doesmake it a little harder than

(21:33):
other languages.
Like I don't know if otherfolks have talked about this on
the podcast, but you knowthey've done studies to show,
like by the end of first grade,what percentage of words in a
language kids in English versusother languages can read in
Europe.
Did you guys?
Has anyone talked about that no, please do.
Okay, so so they did thisanalysis.
They took 13 European languagesand they like said, like how,

(21:54):
what percentage of words in thelanguage can the kids read?
They're in the first gradelevel, right?
So like Greek and Turkish arelike the highest, like 93% or
something of real words andabout the same nonsense words.
You want to guess where Englishwas on the list of 13?

Lori (22:09):
Oh my gosh.
Um, I'm going to say 30%.

Oh, so yes, yes, so correct and correct.

Lori (22:18):
Right, okay, well, you wanted me to guess and if I was
thinking, I was already 13.

Yeah, so it was 30% percent.

Lori (22:27):
Was that really?
Yeah, that's right.
Wow, yeah, isn't that crazy.
So I promise I didn't Google it.
Yeah, I promise.
Yeah, it's crazy.

It's crazy, Right so?
you know, so English does makeit a little harder than other
languages because the, for a lotof historical reasons, we
borrowed spellings and all thiskind of thing.
So you know that makes your thework a little bit harder for
students.
But there are still theseexemplary regularities in the
system that we can help studentsuse to, you know, build their

(22:57):
understanding.
When they don't have somethingto, you know hang there, you
know sort of to get them started.
And that's actually the reasonthat, like, if you're going to
use syllable division, I likeget it in the sense that it
gives you some hooks to hang onright.
So it's like I've got something.
It might give me the wronganswer, I might say tigger or
whatever, it might say dragon orsomething, but it gives me

(23:18):
something that I can use becauseotherwise, particularly poor
readers, like kids with readingdifficulty, they don't know
anything, so they the only thingthey know how to do is guess,
and if you give them some tool,that tool might turn on the
right thing.
So that's why, like, I get theinstinct to do syllable division
.
That's why I did it and I didsee kids improve because they

(23:39):
did have some hooks, you knowlike to to help them.
So so I think you know.
That's why it's.
You know there is some value.
But again, like, the data don'talways support the things that
we like, and so we have tofollow the research and do the
things that are good.

Lori (23:57):
Okay, so we're on board, we're here with you in patterns
over rules.
Melissa and I are in, and I'msure a lot of listeners are
wondering too, then, like whatshould, what should we do then
to teach multisyllabic,polysyllabic words?
And I, I'd love to give youlike a quick uh something to
react to.
That happened in my own housein the last couple of days.

(24:17):
Okay, so I have.
Now this is like semiembarrassing because I feel I
feel like she should know thisword and I don't know what
happened, but so I'll just saythat, um, the word, so this,
this word, came up and I and shesaid, um, alexa told us that we
had a notification, and I saida notification, what?

(24:42):
Okay, so that doesn't soundright to me.
Does it sound right to you?
She's like no, not totally.
I'm like what you?
She's like no, not totally.
I'm like what part?
She's like the, the, not part.
I'm like okay, what in thatpart?
She's like oh, okay, can yousay it differently?
And we finally got tonotification very quickly.
But I mean, first of all, I wasstunned.

(25:04):
I use that word all the time,you know.
I mean just in everyday life weuse that word now, but when she
said it I kind of laughed.
I thought she was kidding.
But I mean quickly we kind oflike drilled down into the quote
part that was, and I didn'tthink it was a particularly
tricky part.
So maybe we could talk throughthat and then you could use that

(25:24):
as like a springboard for someother strategies to do, because
then I can put them in mytoolbox for the next time
something comes up.

Okay, fabulous, so all right.
So notification is a good way.
It's hard because it's long,but let's just what we're gonna
do it.

Lori (25:37):
So I figured you're in the polymultisyllabic part here.

So I know I went all in on that.
So, like you get to do the hardwords right.
So okay, so first, so thestrategy I recommend is a
combination of, like, a morphemestrategy and a soul strategy.
So the morpheme part of it iswhere you find meaning parts in
the words that are typically two, three, four letters, and you

(26:03):
use that to get you started.
And you find those affixes andyou circle them and one of my
colleagues, maureen Lovett she,you know, turned the strategy
peeling off.
So you peel those off of thebase word right, or, if it's not
a word, you take them off ofwhat's left, and that's great
because it reduces the size ofthe problem and for a lot of
students and morphology teachingabout morphemes has awesome

(26:26):
effects for both reading wordsand for understanding the
meaning of words.
It's really a great thing to do.
So once you peel off the affix,then you're left with the rest
of the deal.
So, notification we've got theshun.
Now, as you know, and I know,shun is not the actual morpheme.
I want to be clear forlisteners ION is the morpheme,

(26:48):
but shun is the common way thatwe use it.
The t, you know, says sh orwhatever.
The t-i says sh.
So you know.
So I get this not exactly, butthat pattern is so common.
So you give kids these largerpatterns like shun.
We give the kid the you know,your daughter, the shun.
And now we have notific rightthis is the hard part is like

(27:09):
it's got a lot of pieces right,so, but let's do it, okay.
So the first thing is so.
The next thing is, now that wehave that part off, we're going
to break it into parts, and theway that we do that is we find
the vowels and we mark them.
So you can mark them, we canput a little check mark under
them, okay, and this is kind ofthe learning strategy.

(27:34):
Eventually you get rid of that,but what that does is it tells
you how many parts you're goingto have, because every syllable
has at least one vowel, right,and that's a strategy developed
by this researcher at RowanO'Connor, where she basically
studied this and found that thisstrategy was really effective.
And the first thing you do isto find every syllable has at
least one vowel, meaning that,like EA, those are two vowels
that go together, even the vowelconstant E, two vowels in a
syllable.
So you find the parts thatyou're going to use, right, so a

(27:56):
notification, not-i-fi-ca-y.
So we're going to be fourvowels that we're going to work
with, and then we're going tofigure out what each of the
parts says, breaking it so thatevery part only has one vowel.
Okay, so, and this is where,like what we would do for
syllable division, might differcompared to what I'm going to

(28:17):
suggest.
So the next thing then is tofigure out, like, what do we do
to break the word into parts?
And this is where yourdaughter's you know, her mental
way of doing this is a littlebit different than the way that
we want.
You know, we don't we want kidsto do right.
But I love that example becauseit's just, it's so great, so
it's a great example of kids doall the time.
So when you do this, we'regoing to break it into parts and

(28:38):
this, when I do this, I'm like,actually I'm showing you a
little card in my brain, like,think of a little index card and
you're covering, like the youknow the first part, right?
And for listeners, I'm justholding up my hand in the air
without a piece of paper, anyway.
So you set it up so that theindex card covers part of the

(28:58):
word, so that the first partonly has one vowel, and so there
are two ways that that couldwork.
It could be N-O-T, right, whichis what your daughter was
thinking.
You know, sort of in theory,right.
And there's N-O-T, right, whichis what your daughter was
thinking, you know, sort of intheory, right, and there's N-O,
so it could be either one ofthose, right, and this is the
teaching part, not the partwhere she was just kind of
figuring it out.
But so for the teaching part wesay it could be either one, and
at this point we don't need tohave a rule, so it doesn't

(29:22):
actually matter in a way whichone we use.
It could be no, it could be not.
What students do need tounderstand is that when you have
a vowel at the end of asyllable, it says the long sound
.
If it's not at the end of thesyllable, it's the beginning or
middle.
It says the short sound.
That idea is essential.
So that's where we talk aboutlike open and closed syllables.

(29:43):
Right, that idea is reallycritical.
I don't call them open andclosed syllables.
I typically call them longvowel syllables and short vowel
syllables.
This is like also heresy people, right, this is like the worst
thing ever.
But what I realized is thatlike, well, open and closed
doesn't mean anything to anybody, right?
And then this is important likeit causes people to do things
like the syllable house.

(30:03):
Do you guys know the syllablehouse?

Lori (30:05):
I've seen it.
I was going to ask you about it, so bring it up.
Yes, okay.

So the syllable house is this idea like, what
you do is you make a littlehouse, right, and what you do is
you can put a word like hen init, right, h-e-n, right, and you
go H-E, and then there's a doorand the N is on the door, okay.
So when the door is closed,okay, the N is at the end, the
door is closed, okay.
So the vowel can't go outsideand say its name okay, it's
closed, the door is closed, it'sclosed.
In.
When the door is closed, itsays the short sound.

(30:35):
So hen door is closed, says the, the s sound, the short sound.
Then you open the door becausethe n was on the door and now
the e is at the end of thesyllable, okay, and now, because
the door is open, you can it,says he okay, and that doesn't
work.
All the time, though it doesn'tokay but the the thing about it
is it's not so much whether itworks, it's that it.

(30:58):
The only purpose of that is toget kids to remember that that
pattern is called open or closed.
That's what the door is for,because the kids are trying to
try and get kids understand that, like, when it's open it says
the long sound, when it's closedit says the short sound.
So what that means is, like thesyllable houses, like this one
level removed from what we'retrying to teach kids, which is,

(31:20):
like you know, the long, there'sa long sound, the short sound.
But because teachers like well,I need kids to know what an
open and closed syllable is, letme me do this other thing to
understand what open and closedsyllables is.
So now we're like two stepsaway from what we want kids to
know, which is that, like, atthe end it says the long sound,
in the middle it says the shortsound.

Melissa (31:38):
And it's asking them to remember another thing that
they don't really necessarilyneed to remember.

Yeah, like the term open and closed is like, I
mean, it has a linguistic base,like there's a whole thing about
the linguistics of that.
But, like you know, kids don'tneed to be linguist, right?
So I started calling them longvowel syllables and short vowel
syllables, which has its ownchallenges because, like you can
say, like, well, ea, like, is along vowel, right.
But I thought, well, it's a,you know, it's a useful way to

(32:05):
think of it, and so I justthought this is easier.
And I don't have data on thisexcept that, like, teachers tell
me this works and have sent meemails saying, like I had a
student that this really helpedthem.
So anyway, so we call them longvowel syllables and short vowel
syllables.
People call them open andclosed syllables.
I don't really have a quarrelwith that as long as you don't

(32:26):
teach the syllable house.
So I don't think it's necessary, but just don't try to get the
kids to remember that by doing aseparate thing.
So then, once we have that idea, the vowels at the end says the
long sound In notification.
If we cover it so that the T iscovered, n-o says no, and we
know that.
Because of vowels at the end,n-o says no, and we know that

(32:49):
because of vowels at the end OK,and so that goes along with.
It's very similar to thesyllable division strategy in
that we're breaking words intoparts and we're using our
knowledge that vowels indifferent locations make
different sounds.
The difference is we don't havea rule, because you know, a
student could just as easily putthe card after the T and say
not OK, and so that's where,like you, don't have to have a

(33:13):
rule to do it.
So and this is this is actuallygreat Notification is a great
example too, because you have noOkay, and then you have TIFF.
Now, technically, because ithas one F, it should be tie,
it's not no, tie, it's no to orno to, it's actually a schwa.
But notification, right.

(33:35):
Some of them have the long sound, some of them have the short
sound.
So if you're going to divide upthis really long word which I
would not for teaching purposesprobably it's fine.
For our example, it's going tohave places where the long sound
is the right one and the shortsound is the right one.
But if we don't have a rule, ifwe just say, we're going to
break it.
So every syllable has one vowel, we can figure out what those
vowels are and put it together.

(33:56):
And that last piece is exactlywhat you very quickly held your
daughter in your sandwich islike, hmm, you don't know a word
.
That's like that's not a wordthat you know, and that's really
cool that you figured out, likewhere it was, like what's a
word like that that you know?
And she's like, oh,notification, because yeah, like
you said, like this is in theether now, like you know, we're
getting notifications like allthe time.

Lori (34:18):
Every second of every day, right, I mean, yeah, I was.
I honestly that was.
I feel like that's um a goodexample, cause I was shocked to
add all those other things intoit.
I was like you have heard thisword so often, I've said it, I
don't, I don't, I guess shehadn't said it before, but we've
said it, we've, we've talked.
It just felt like so crazy tome, you know, as, like a mom and

(34:40):
a teacher, like oh my gosh,this word that I've been using,
we didn't know, like maybe Ineed to do better.

You do not need to do better.
I am certain that, like she isgetting the best literacy
environment ever.
No, but I think it's a reallycool example because also she
knew what it was right.

Lori (34:58):
Totally yeah, she could explain what.
Well and okay, so here'sanother thought.
So after that I said so whatother words are similar to it?
Just to kind of throw somesomething else out there, cause
you know, cause you're a teacherwhen you're a teacher you like
to do that and she's like oh,okay, so notebook, notorious,
but she was giving me all youknow, all those kinds of ones

(35:19):
with the different, and none ofthem held any like.
None of them were super similarto notification, other than
maybe like notify Right, Like Icause I wrote down the ones that
she gave me, but they did allhave that O sound.

Melissa (35:32):
So once she was able to identify, then we went on and
that's funny, lori, because Iwas wondering if she was almost
kind of doing that peeling offthat.
You mentioned, devin with theword not at the beginning,
because she just saw this bigword and she was like, well, I
know, not right, because nowthat you're saying that I'm
wondering if her brain stuck on.
Okay, what other words aren-o-t?

(35:53):
But say, note you know right,right.

Lori (35:57):
Well, I mean we'll not know, because we lost uh
interest in that.

Melissa (36:00):
I'm sure she did, but you didn't.

Lori (36:02):
I didn't.
I'm still thinking about it.
Yeah, that's pretty cool thoughyeah, I so I

just people might find this amusing for themselves
.
And, um, it's like you know,this happens all the time as
adults, because we read words inour brains.
We don't read them out loud,and so you end up with like this
, like mental, likerepresentation of the
pronunciation of a word and youknow exactly what it means, but
it turns out it's not right,okay.
And so then you have thismoment when you're like in like

(36:30):
10th grade and you like say itout loud and people are like
what are you saying?
Uh, do you guys know?
Do you have an example of thisfor yourself?
Like the word that you said outloud and you like totally got
it wrong well, we always giveour hermione example which is a
name.

Lori (36:44):
It's a name, so it's different than a word.
We always say we always.

Melissa (36:47):
we both said Hermione in our heads until we heard it
out loud and we're like what?

Yeah, it's perfect , right.
So it's like, but you knewexactly who she was, you knew
everything about her.
You just like didn't know theright pronunciation.

Lori (36:59):
Yeah, I feel like Devin an example might be like I
remember as a, maybe like ateenager.
Or saying the word debris outloud, but saying debris, debris,
right, who knows why.

Because there's no reason for it not to be right,
because you knew what it was,you've read about it in some
textbook or whatever, and likeit might as well be right.
It just isn't right, and so youknow.
And so I think that's you know.
I mean it's still part of thatsame thing of like we need to
figure it out, but I love that's.

(37:40):
I mean it's still part of thatsame thing of like we need to
figure it out.
But I love that kind of thinkingbecause it is true that the two
things we do so we said thatthe one thing you do is you're
always looking for somecombination of your strategies
and maybe you know, you justkind of you bring it up, however
, and you just, and you end upthinking it's Debris, because I
mean it might as well be right,cause there's no reason for it
not to be.
And what's cool, is youactually developed like a mental

(38:00):
anchor for what that meantRight?
It just, you know, is it's notwhat people actually say in the
real word.
Like you know, I thought likeYosemite, I thought Yosemite was
the correct pronunciation.

Melissa (38:13):
Like yeah right.

You hear about Yosemite and then you read
Yosemite, you don't realizethey're even the same thing,
right?
It's like two differentnational parks.

Lori (38:22):
Which is making me think so much about the power of
teachers and why it's soimportant to develop that oral
language right.
I mean just like, even I meanand also show the words as we're
developing that language, like,for example, debris or Yosemite
, like just showing that word isgoing to make that connection
for our students, ornotification.

Yes.

Melissa (38:43):
Yeah, and we always think about the oral language in
terms of meaning and vocabularyand you know, oh, that's on the
language comprehension side ofthings.
But you know, to bring it overhere into, even when they're
decoding the word, you know theycan.
It can really help them ifthey've heard the word before.

Yeah, I actually recommend to that point that,
like teachers actually tellstudents like out loud the words
that they're going to bepracticing in the lesson, so
they hear them out loud, right?
So especially if they're wordsthat are less familiar to the
kids, right?
And I really want to be clearIf it's a really rare word, it's
not really a word, it might aswell be a nonsense word.

(39:22):
I had a program I taught onetime where they had hobnob on
the list of real words and theyalso had Pipkin, and if you know
what a Pipkin is, I'll bereally impressed.

Melissa (39:32):
Um, I do because you used it in your article.
Yes, oh yeah, but I don't evenremember what it is.
Still, it's a.

It's an earthenware cooking vessel.
I think we're in the middleages.
Yeah, um, yeah.
So you know, don't teach thereal words, but if they're less
familiar to students, there'snothing wrong with saying listen
to this word, say it out loudwith me, because it's critical
kids have the correctpronunciation of the words, and
you know a lot of students withreading difficulty.
If you ask them to say thewords, they won't even say them

(40:01):
correctly, and so it'simpossible actually to get the
right answer.
If you think crocodile ispronounced doco-cryo, right?
So we need to get students topronounce the words first when
we're teaching a lesson.
So I recommend that a lot oftimes if you're teaching words
that might be less familiar tostudents, or just to confirm,
like it's crocodile, let's allsay it together.
Crocodile, say it slowly, andso on.

Melissa (40:23):
Yeah, so I wanted to tell you you've talked a little
bit about this.
We've talked to other people onthe podcast about set for
variability you didn't use thosewords, but you've kind of
talked about it which is thatidea of being flexible and
trying out differentpronunciations, especially with
the vowels sounds.
What does that from your lens?

(40:43):
What does that actually looklike in a classroom?
Like, what can a teacher do tohelp students with that?

actually look like in a classroom, like what can a
teacher do to help studentswith that?
Yeah, so the answer is I don'tknow.
So, so this is like.
This is also what happens whenyou're like a science person is
like a lot of times like Icannot tell you.
I can tell you what I think butI don't know if there's data on
that Right.
So yeah, we don't.
There's not.
There've been a couple ofstudies where people have taught
students a strategy wherethey'll say a word out loud and

(41:13):
they'll say it incorrectly, andthey ask students to tell them
what the word actually is.
So they'll say like shallderrather than shoulder, and
they'll have students tell themwhat the right word is right.
And I did that in a program thatwe developed, and we found that
the program we developed hadokay effects, but I did not
think that the effects could beattributed specifically to that

(41:35):
activity, and so the data arepretty unclear whether that
actually works.
And the study that I'mdescribing is with kindergarten
students and they got smalleffects for that, but it was on
a very small set of words, andso I'm not convinced that that
necessarily is the right thingto do.
So I'm so, let's be clearteaching students like

(41:57):
mispronounced words and havingthem correct those is is a
really is a good idea.
So, because the idea set forvariability is that when we
talked about which is like wemake the wrong thing, the right
thing right, and the set isbasically the idea of like I'm
set up mentally for the ideathat it's going to be variable,
right, so I recognize ahead oftime it's going.
I always found that confusing,like what is the?

Lori (42:18):
what is?

why is it called this?
I still love it.
I tried to call it somethingelse in a paper one time, but it
didn't catch on.
Um, so so set for variability.
It's like it's not.
You know it's anyway.
So the term set for variabilitybasically means I'm ready for
it not to be the correct thing.
And so the thing that I thinkwe should do because I don't
think we should teach kids likemispronounced words is literally

(42:42):
to do what we already talkedabout, which is to teach kids to
be flexible so that when theysound something out, they know
the correct answer.
And it gets to that point ofusing words deliberately where
it might not quite work right,Not early on, right, so you know
, when you do a word that haslike the, you don't use cotton

(43:02):
right at the beginning, mayberight, Not in the first lesson,
but like, but you want toquickly and strategically build
in words where it's not perfect,right, when it does sound a
little bit different, because wewant students to get used to
that idea of being flexible.
So really, the idea of beingflexible is the best way to

(43:23):
teach kids set variability.
So you know, some of mycolleagues at Florida State have
like talked about, they've beenstudying how to do that and
they don't have results.
I don't know what the resultsare from those studies they just
finished them, like last year,but do that.
You know, and I think it's alsogood to remember.
Phonological awareness isliterally.
This is why phonologicalawareness is important, because

(43:43):
it's not about sounds andisolation, it's about locating
that mental entry in your brain.
That is, you associate thepronunciation, you associate
with the written pattern.
That's why phonologicalawareness is so critical.
So you know even early on, whenyou're teaching kids like
phonological awareness andyou're segmenting and blending,
that's helpful because it getsstudents to like put those

(44:06):
sounds together, take them apart, so they understand.
When they're putting themtogether particularly, they are
getting this idea that they cometogether and they might sound a
little off and then you turnthem into the right thing.
If you do f-a-n it's fan, notfan, it's not fan right.
That's really useful to getkids to do that.

(44:27):
So that's key.

Melissa (44:29):
Yeah, that's really helpful and I know we've heard a
few times where people say thatthat sounds like we're just
asking kids to guess at what theword is.
But I, you know, what I justheard you say is like you know a
word can, or even you know aletter or groups of letters can
have you know a few differentways to pronounce it.
So let them be flexible withinthose.

(44:54):
So it's not just take a stab atwhat you think this word is
altogether, but like, okay, like, just you know, be open to
trying different sounds out.
That are all sounds that theseletters can make.

Yeah, and that's the key part where we get out of
guessing, cause it's like it'snot that we're not telling you
the thing we're telling you.
It could be the long sound, itcould be the short sound, right?
So it's not like there's thishuge universe of things that it
can be and that alone is reallyhelpful for students.
So it's not like kids see EAand we've never taught them that
EA says eh.
Right, like we teach them thatEA sometimes says eh, and then

(45:25):
we use that flexibility to getus the rest of the way there.

Lori (45:28):
Yeah, yeah Well, and that's what we do as adults,
that's what we do when we readbigger words.
I think if we try to pigeonholekids into like, quote the rules
, as we said, the rules just,you know, don't always work and
those pattern-seeking our brainsare pattern-seeking machines,
seeking our brains are patternseeking machines.
So we want to try to see like,oh okay, if it's, is there

(45:53):
another way to say this thatalso makes sense perhaps in
other contexts, kind of freeing,liberation, you know.

Like, your daughter is another great
example of that Like, and whatyou asked her to do is a really
great idea because you asked herto find other examples to sort
of like, reinforce that idea.
That, like, when you see this,it says that right, because
that's what we're trying to getkids to do is get their brains
to pick up on the patterns inthe language.
Right, it's never, you know,it's quasi regular.

(46:17):
But there are things like, youknow, notification, and you know
I can't remember the otherwords that you had her said.
She said but yeah, exactly that.

Melissa (46:24):
Well, you mentioned morphology, but I just wanted to
like circle back to make surewe touched on how important
morphology is in readingmultisyllabic words.
Is there anything else youwanted to say about morphology?

No, the only thing I would add is that you need to
give students like a bank ofaffixes.
So you know, you can't just belike find the parts right.
You need to tell them what theparts are right.
And I actually watched a lessonrecently like that.
I was surprised like theyactually did have the kids kind
of like figure it out.
Like it's like here are wordswith ION and like what do you
think it says?
I'm not a big fan of?

(46:57):
Like what do you think it saysI'm a big fan of?
Like TION says shun.
What does it say?
Shun, right?
I do mention a little bit aboutwhat it means.
Like you know, say like the actof or whatever it means when
you're doing something is theway I usually explain it, right
and so.
But that's that's.
I just do that.
I focus on TION session.

(47:19):
Let's read words with TION.
So students need a bank ofaffixes that you teach them
ahead of time, so when they goto peel off, they they know, you
know those and there's no likeperfect bank of them.

Melissa (47:29):
Just find a you know decent list of them and that can
start pretty early in likekindergarten, first grade.

Yes, so yeah, teaching kids like inflections,
like, as you know, teaching themlike inflections meaning, like
I N G E D, teaching them thosethings like really early on,
great data on that and then,like by end of first grade,
second grade, bringing in moreof the other affixes.
So you know, third, fourth,fifth grade, they're going to do
a lot more of that stuff andthey're going to start using

(47:58):
them a lot more for meaning andyou know, getting into, like
bicycle, you know the buy andthe, you know cycle and so on.

Lori (48:05):
Really quickly.
Just since we just talked aboutset for variability or being
flexible, you say affixes.
In my head I say affixes.
Is it right?
Wrong?
What's going on?

There's no correct .

Lori (48:17):
No difference?

Okay, no, I mean listen, if we want to be all
like technical about it, it's ashort foul because it's you know
it's VCCV, so affixes.
You know it's it's bccv, soaffix is possibly correct, but I
don't know.
Can I also just say this is myfavorite thing.
Do you know, like do you know,that basil is not pronounced
basil in like the uk?

Lori (48:36):
basil.
I just went last summer andthey were saying basil and I
felt like I was in a movie.

It was great yeah, it's a great.
It's a perfect example of thisexact thing, right, where, like
we, just we did it one way, theydid it another way, we
basically just divided it in adifferent like place.
Essentially right.
Do you know what they say forlike process in Canada?
Process, it's process.

Lori (49:00):
But we all still understand each other.

They do, they do and we understand them too,
because it's set for variability, because it's so close right,
yeah and so.
But I just love those examplesbecause it's just like different
linguistic concepts.
We basically chose a differentway to divide up the word
essentially right and so youknow.
So I think it's a good examplewhy flexibility is really
important.

Lori (49:21):
Yes, so fun to think about too.
You know, you're like nerdywhen you're sitting here like
and what other words are thereright?

Totally yeah, yeah .

Lori (49:29):
All right.
So, devin, I feel like we'recoming to a close here, but I'm
wondering if there's anythingelse you'd like to say to a
teacher listening who might feelstuck or unsure how to start,
or like, oh my gosh, this is newinformation.
I've been, you know, doing thisone way and I want to try to
shift, or I'm just wanting tolearn how to think about it
differently, so I'll leave it toyou.

Yeah, so I did.
So I wrote an article, a coupleof articles about this that
people can email me for.
One of them is like totally,you know I can, I can post
online.
I'm working on fixing mywebsite, but and I can send it
to you all the two of you too,because you guys can, you know,
share things.

Lori (50:03):
Yeah, we can share things publicly.
We can put all of this in theshow notes if we have the links,
okay.

Yeah, so I'll send you the one.
So there's.
I think you can look at thatarticle to get to give you some
ideas about this Cause I ampretty specific about some of
these, some of these things.
That's one thing you can do.
There are, like you know,videos online of you know,
people explaining these kinds ofthings.
I've done a couple of them soyou could look for those as an

(50:27):
example of what to do.
So, you know, if you're not sure, like you know, you do want to
learn about how these thingswork, right, and I, you know,
and people ask me recently, like, if you have a program that
does this, like, should I justlike change it?
And my answer was absolutelynot, like, so so you've, like
everybody else in the school isdoing that I think the kids are

(50:51):
better off if you don't try tochange it, okay.
So, like I don't want to saystay the course, exactly if
you're using syllable division,but I don't want to say change
it tomorrow unless you have thatflexibility and if the kids
haven't learned it already,don't change the game on them,
like you know, right now.
But I think you know, thinkabout for next year, right, like

(51:14):
, is there a way I could do thisdifferently and, and you know,
consider a different option, butyou know, if you're doing
something with the long word,you're on the right track and
focus on more themes.
If I was gonna say anythingspecifically.

Lori (51:25):
This was so fun to talk with you.
You did not disappoint.
Thank you for being awesome.
This is great, like we couldtalk all day, but we're so
grateful that you took some timeto talk with us and just
chatted out about these reallyimportant things that teachers
are grappling with like everysingle day, and we're you know
we're struggling with too, sothank you.

Thank you guys day , and we're, you know we're
struggling with too.
So thank you, thank you guys.
I mean you guys do so muchgreat stuff for the field.
Like, I think we're all betterfor the work that you do.
So I don't know how manypodcasts people will say like,
thank you, not just for today,but in general for what you do.
But let me, if they do, let meadd to that.
You know, um, thank you guysfor the work that you do.
It's really awesome that youhelp all of us.

Melissa (52:09):
Thank you.
To stay connected with us, signup for our email list at
literacypodcastcom, join ourFacebook group and follow us on
Instagram and Twitter.

Lori (52:23):
If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share
with a teacher friend or leaveus a five-star rating and review
on Apple Podcasts.

Melissa (52:33):
Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions
expressed by the hosts andguests of the Melissa and Lori
Love Literacy podcast are notnecessarily the opinions of
Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori (52:44):
We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to
learn with us.

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