Research-Based Routines for Multisyllabic Word Reading with Jessica Toste and Brennan Chandler

Episode 237 

Teachers know the challenge: students hit multisyllabic words and suddenly reading slows down. In this episode, researchers Jessica Toste and Brennan Chandler share research-based routines that make multisyllabic word reading easier, more automatic, and more effective. You’ll hear practical strategies rooted in the research to help your students tackle big words!

📚 Resources Mentioned

• Word Connections

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Episode Transcript

Lori (00:01):
Multi-syllabic word reading is tricky.
Big words are where manyreaders get stuck, especially
for older students who are stillworking on decoding.
In the first five minutes ofthis episode, we'll tell you
exactly why this matters.

Melissa (00:17):
Our guests today are two incredible researchers,
jessica Tost and BrennanChandler.
They'll help us understand whymulti-syllabic word reading gets
more complex, which classroomroutines really work and how you
can support students even whentime and resources are tight.

Lori (00:35):
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 (00:45):
We worked together in Baltimore when the district
adopted a new literacycurriculum.

Lori (00:50):
We realized there was so much more to learn about how to
teach reading and writing.

Melissa (00:55):
Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.

Lori (01:01):
Hi, jessica and Brennan, welcome to the podcast.
We can't wait to talk all aboutwords with you today.

Jessica Toste (01:08):
Thanks so much for having us.
I'm excited to be here.

Brennan Chandler (01:11):
I'm excited to be here as well.

Melissa (01:13):
Excellent, and so I'm excited to talk about
multisyllabic words because Iknow, like the past few years,
everyone's been talking aboutthe science of reading, which
has been a lot of talk aboutphonics, instruction and that
very beginning stage of learningto read, but there have now
been more and more questionsabout okay, well, what happens

(01:33):
when my kids get into thirdgrade, fourth grade, fifth grade
, even middle school, and wehave multisyllabic words?
So why are multi-syllabic wordsso important for our older
readers?

Jessica Toste (01:49):
This is a great question because as students
move into those intermediategrades, the challenge isn't just
more complex content that theyhave in front of them and more
complex text, but the wordsthemselves are becoming more
complex and readingcomprehension relies on being
able to accurately andefficiently access words that

(02:11):
we're reading.
So the complexity of thosewords is really important for us
to think about and ensure thatstudents have support in order
to access them and read them andunderstand and make meaning
from the text they have in frontof them at school.
And the reason why it's soimportant to think about these

(02:31):
complex words is that asstudents move into the upper
elementary grades, multisyllabicwords really dominate academic
text.
Every time students are readingcontent text in their content
areas, most of the new academicwords that they are faced with
are multisyllabic in nature.
They're more complex.
It's been estimated there's somework that looks at the types of

(02:51):
words that students are readingin academic text, and it's
estimated that studentsencounter more than 20,000
multisyllabic words in printevery year, and these words
really carry the meaning of thetext that they're reading.
So if they don't know thosewords, there's really a lag in
their comprehension.
They're unable to figure outwhat that sentence or that text

(03:14):
is telling them what informationis really central to what
they're reading.
And we know that students whohave inefficient word level
reading skills tend to skip overthese words.
They'll inaccurately read thesewords but not recognize the
error in accurately reading theword, and that really impacts
the way that they're accessingtext and the way they're making

(03:36):
meaning and the way they'reengaging with new content in
their classes.

Melissa (03:41):
That's so many words just 20,000 a year.
That's so so many words that ifyou don't know it, you know
you're just not going tounderstand what you're reading.
And I liked what you weresaying.
It's not even just like I canread the word and I know, I, but
I don't know what that word is,I don't know what it means
you're talking about.
Even just reading the word,like just decoding the word

(04:01):
we're talking about, right,absolutely.

Jessica Toste (04:03):
Absolutely yeah.

Melissa (04:05):
I think my question there would be like well, if
students have cracked the codeand they know how to read single
syllable words, what makes itso much harder to read a
multisyllabic word?
Like you would think, can'tthey just take what they know
from reading single syllablewords and apply that to a
multisyllable word?
But why is it so much harder?

Jessica Toste (04:26):
Yeah, they.
So we call them complex wordsbecause of all these other sort
of new features that happen morewithin multi-syllabic words.
So students will take kind ofserial decoding approaches that
they've been really successfulwith in foundational reading and
those don't apply in the sameway as you get to multisyllabic

(04:47):
words.
So a few things that I'll share, and Brennan will jump in too
and share some reasons of whymultisyllabic words are really
more difficult to decode.
The first one seems kind ofsilly and obvious to even say,
but it's just that they arelonger.
The increased word length alonemakes them harder.
If you have a student who evenrelies a little bit on serial

(05:10):
decoding so like saying eachkind of sound and blending it
together, that becomes verydifficult when you have a long
word that has 10 or 12 lettersin it.
So that alone is a littletrickier.
If you have a student whostruggled with reading or who's
been in intervention and thishas not been something that has
come easy to them, that longword in front of you also feels

(05:33):
a little bit stressful, like ittook a long time to get
successful in decoding and nowyou're asking me to deal with
this huge word in front of me.
So the word length alone makesthem more complex.
The other thing is that infoundational programs we teach
students grapheme-phonemecorrespondences, letter sound
correspondences, and we teachthem sort of how to use that

(05:56):
consistently.
We teach them hopefully in alittle bit of flexibility in
that, but they've really learnedthose letter sound
correspondences and how to applythem.
And in multisyllabic wordsthose letter sound
correspondences are lesspredictable.
So there are patterns andletters that students see that
in previous words it alwayswould have said that letter or

(06:18):
pattern would have always said acertain sound and now it's not
saying that sound anymore andthere isn't necessarily anything
in the word that's indicatingto them that it is different.
So the examples I always give intraining because I think they
come up and they're sort of likethe ones that the first time
you see you're like why doesthat say that word Is kernel?

(06:40):
So C-O-L-O-N-E-L.
Why, when I look at that, wouldI say kernel?
There's nothing indicating tome that I would pronounce it
that way.
So the predictability of thatword is reduced.
Is making a k sound.

(07:01):
So in some programs we'vetaught students that sometimes
when they see CH it will make ak sound.
But a lot of students,especially those who have been
in intervention for a while,have learned years in and out
that CH says ch, ch says ch, andnow they see it, they want to
say ch at the beginning of aword and it's not doing that

(07:22):
anymore.
So you can think of many, manyexamples in multisyllabic words,
but there's less predictability, and so that reduction in
predictability makes them harderfor students to access.
And I'll let Brennan share acouple of other reasons.

Brennan Chandler (07:39):
Yeah, I'll go ahead and further complicate
some of the reasons whymultisyllabic word reading is so
tricky.
In English we have stressed andunstressed syllables and we
have multisyllabic words we kindof add in.
We have a time-based sort ofpattern to our reading and how
we talk, and so in English whena syllable is unstressed the
vowel sound often changes orgets reduced, usually so we call

(08:01):
it a schwa sound, like in thesecond syllable of banana.
It's that sound, and so thatmeans when kids hear or say the
word out loud it doesn't alwaysmatch that pure vowel sound that
they might expect from theirtraditional phonics program in
K2.
So banana family.
Some people just reduce that,that syllable in the middle and
say family and not even havethat there, and so that can

(08:24):
really throw a kid off whenthey're going to read these
words.
What is an uh?
Why am I saying uh so much?
We can't purely say everyactual pure vowel sound and we
read these longer words and ontop of that, figuring out where
the syllables break is oftenalso not straightforward, and so
when kids try to read longwords we kind of give them hints
about the syllables, and wherethe syllable lands we have might

(08:46):
have a different vowel sound.
It might be a long sound orshort sound, but that gets that
becomes really tricky decidingwhich vowel sound to use.
It can really throw kids offwhen they're reading these words
and they're thinking, oh mygosh, every word, like in single
syllable words, should havethese pure vowel sounds.
Another reason that evencomplicates it, and our last
reason really, is this idea ofmorphological constancy, which

(09:10):
is basically this idea that thespelling of a morpheme, like a
base word or a prefix, tends tostay the same across related
words, even when thepronunciation changes or shift.
And so the word magic andmagician right, that magic part,
stays the same.
We sort of add that suffix.
There it actually changed thesound.
That final C sound changes, butthe spelling retains.

(09:33):
The spelling stays the same.
Nation and national right.
We kind of derive a differentform of our phonology, our sound
, but the spelling is the same.
And so we teach skilled readers, use their knowledge of these
consistent patterns to connectrelated words.
But if a student hasn't beentaught to look for these
relationships, each new word cansometimes feel like they're
starting from scratch.
And so really all of this tosay all these long words,

(09:57):
multi-syllabic words, big wordsaren't just hard because they're
long.
That's one reason, but reallyit's really all comes down to
the hidden vowel changes and thesound shifts.
Um, that, really that reallymakes them really really tricky
to read and to spell.

Lori (10:11):
Yeah, I love that term sound shifts.
I'm going to start using that.
I like it.
Um, you said something aboutteaching students.
This like, if students haven'tbeen taught and I I kind of want
to get into that a little bitmore what are some effective
ways to teach students how toread multi-syllabic words?
I, you know, I'm imagining it'snot effective to stop students

(10:32):
every time they come to amulti-syllabic word and be like,
okay, let's unpack this everysingle time.
So I imagine we have to givethem strategies and help them
understand these concepts thatyou just talked about, and are
there any programs that do thislike we can look to for guidance
?
So, jessica, I'm going to turnit over to you first.

Jessica Toste (10:51):
Yeah.
So I'll preface this by saying,even though we have decades of
research on sort of foundationalskills instruction, what early
reading development looks like,how students become proficient
in word reading, we don't haveas much work looking at what
does that look like as we moveinto these complex words.
We sort of think, well,students become proficient

(11:14):
readers, and now they'reproficient readers.
But the reality is all students, so all of our learners, as
they move into kind of third,fourth grade and beyond, do need
some continued word readinginstruction to help them
transition into reading thesecomplex words and to understand
how the word reading skillsthey've been successful with
before, how those are going tobecome more flexible or applied

(11:37):
in a little bit more flexibleway to access these complex
words.
And then, for students who havereading difficulties or
language difficulties, theyreally require more targeted
explicit instruction in order toaccess multisyllabic words.
So they require similar kind ofsystematic explicit instruction
that they've received infoundational skills to

(11:59):
transition that into complexwords, to move from serial
decoding into being moreefficient to recognize affixes,
so prefixes and suffixes inwords.
And in order to do this we knowthat what seems to be most
successful, what not seems to bewhat is most successful is that
students really need to have astructured but flexible approach

(12:23):
to decode complex words andthey need to be taught this
approach because they're notnecessarily have been practicing
flexibility in early grades asthey're learning to decode.
And so when we think about thisapproach, what it looks like,
there's some research ondifferent research-based

(12:44):
practices that support students'reading of complex words, how
to learn about multisyllabicwords and strategies to decode
those, and what those practicesreally do is help students move
from these foundational skillsinto kind of a bridge to complex
words, a bridge of likesupporting them in being

(13:05):
flexible, support in the waythat they decode and the way
that they think of words, and Ithink of a lot of multi-Slavic
word reading instruction,building on students having a
strong foundation already ofunderstanding grapheme-phoneme
correspondences, understandinghow to decode, moving in towards
more fluency and efficiencywith decoding.

(13:26):
But now they need another layerof kind of learning strategies
to be flexible and continuing topractice that flexibility in
order to optimize their reading.
So there are a few practices wecan kind of we're going to talk
about some instructionalroutines, I think, that are most
effective for students.
We also have my team and Ideveloped a number of years ago

(13:50):
a program called WordConnections, which is a
supplemental targeted readingintervention that includes these
research-based instructionalpractices.
So they're included in astructured way that's all
packaged and ready to go that ateacher can pick up and use for
intervention.

Lori (14:09):
Let's talk about some routines that teachers can use
to teach multisyllabic words.
There's four we're going totalk about today the essential
skills routine, thesyllabication routine, a
morphology routine and an oralreading fluency routine.
So let's start with thatessential skills routine.

(14:29):
Brennan, can you tell us alittle bit about that?

Brennan Chandler (14:32):
Yeah, let's do it.
So we'll kind of outline fourroutines that Jess kind of
alluded to are these activeingredients and effective
multi-syllabic word readinginstruction.
And the first one is what wecall the essential skills
routine and really we couldthink of this routine as a brief
warm-up for students learningto tackle multisyllabic words
and it's built on the idea thatvowels really, as we talked

(14:53):
about with multisyllabic wordreading, are a tricky part of
big words because English usesthe same spelling often for
multiple sounds.
We'll call those the variantcorrespondences, and so spelling
often for multiple sounds,we'll call those the variant
correspondences.
And so for example, the vowelteam EA can say E like in heat
and E like in bread and A likein great right, and so in this

(15:19):
routine we want to kind of fillin these foundational phonics
gaps and kind of provide awarm-up when we go into the
other routines that reallytarget more of the complexities
of multisyllabic word reading.
And so in this routine we cansimply pick out like a vowel
type so we could think about ourcontrolled vowels or consonant
vowel or CVE words, magic Ewords or other vowel teams as
well, and we're going to zero inon a few of those vowel teams

(15:40):
at a time and then we're goingto train students to recognize
all the sounds it can make.
And so if we're thinking aboutR-controlled vowels, we can say
we can kind of drill them almostwith flashcards.
Right, er says R, ar says R,all of those right.
So we'll kind of go throughthat and then we're just going
to simply have them read somesingle syllable words with those

(16:00):
vowel teams embedded, sort ofto again to get their brains
warmed up to then go ahead andtackle these longer words.
We can have them read someshort decodable sentences as
well.
But this really is a briefroutine, just a couple minutes,
from sound to word to evensentence, to fill in some of
those phonics gaps that manyolder students might have.
And it kind of also gives themthat added knowledge for when

(16:22):
they go to read and spell singlesyllable words still, kind of
also gives them the addedknowledge for when they go to
read and spell single syllablewords still, and it again fills
in those gaps so they can goahead and start attacking those
words with a little moreconfidence instead of just
guessing.

Lori (16:33):
Oh my gosh, I love that.
I love the idea too of callingit an essential skills routine.
It's like the foundation andwhat I'm hearing you say is that
the fluency for those, forexample, the vowel teams that
you mentioned.
It's really important thatstudents have that understanding
essentially from the beginning.
So we're going to make surethey have that fluently and then
we can go and build on.
So, brennan, I know you'regoing to talk about the

(16:56):
syllabication routine next,which I'm super interested in.
Could you share a bit?

Brennan Chandler (17:03):
more about that routine for teaching
multisyllabic words.
Yeah, and so after we sort ofget them warmed up, we can think
about that skill, thatessential skills routine, right
Again as the these essentialcomponents really of reading
words.
Um, we'll go ahead and get intothe syllabication routine.
And so this routine sort of iswe need a routine like this
because many students,especially those we know with
reading difficulties, dyslexia,learning disabilities, don't

(17:23):
have a reliable strategy fordecoding and attacking words.
We could think of this one aslike, really like an attack
strategy instead of guessing orskipping.
And so we have, historically, alot of times when we would
think about how can we teachkids that struggle to learn how
to read these words, give them away to sort of unlock these
words?
And so we used to do a lot moreof traditional, more syllable

(17:46):
division, rules of thinkingabout types and how we divide
the syllable and all of that tokind of give us as teachers sort
of a structure on how to teachthese words and sort of for
students as well to sort ofunlock these.
But we're finding more and morethat those patterns aren't as
reliable and English doesn'talways follow these neat
patterns right.
It's quasi-regular language,there's regular, but there's a

(18:08):
lot of irregularities as well,and so, instead of thinking
about the rules, we can teachthem this flexible process to
apply to really any big wordthat they encounter.
And so this routine starts withwhat we call or I've kind of
coined now as vowel roll call,meaning we want to warm students
up by running through all thealternate pronunciations of the

(18:30):
five vowel letters that all thefive letters make plus Y, and so
students say the short and longsounds for each vowel, you can
put them up on the board, allright, a long sound, a short
sound, a go through them kind oflike a roll call, do the three
sounds of Y, and this kind ofgets their brains warmed up in
prime for that flexibility.

(18:50):
So we're really trying to teachstrategic and flexible decoders,
kind of as Jez talked aboutthat bridge.
We can think about kids whosometimes are over decoders,
that serial decoding thatthey're kind of stuck on.
And here we're going to thinkokay, when you see one of these
five vowel, team or vowel,single vowels, they can make all
these different sounds and theycan also say or that schwa, so

(19:12):
we can kind of introduce that aswell.
So we warm up with a littleflexing and then we move into a
strategy called Eshlav, or everysyllable has at least one vowel
done.
There's been some greatresearch done on this by
O'Connor and colleagues, andthis is really a flexible,
syllable-based approach groundedin the simple truth that every

(19:33):
syllable must have at least onevowel in English, and so it's a
strategy.
We're gonna model the strategy.
There's about six steps here.
Do you want me to tell you thesteps?

Lori (19:43):
I would love to hear the steps.
Okay, all right, we'll talkabout six steps here.
Do you want me to tell you thesteps?
I would love to hear the steps.

Brennan Chandler (19:45):
Okay, all right, we'll talk about the
steps.
So there's six steps here.
But the importance here is wewant to, we're going to model
this a lot and provide a lot ofguided practice with feedback.
So it's not just kind of thisone and done strategy.
So the first thing we're goingto do is, when we come to a big
word, so we might, we mightmodel this, let's say, with the
word unbelievable that's oftenmy go-to word First we're going

(20:06):
to underline the vowels in theword.
Then we're going to join thevowel team so they stay together
.
So in unbelievable we have I-E,so we're going to join those
vowel teams together, and sothis already gets kids thinking
okay, here are all the vowels,the actual written vowels, so I
can expect that many syllablesin this word, because in English
every single syllable has avowel, and so we join those

(20:26):
vowel teams together.
The third part is is to circlethe known parts, so the parts
that you know.
So these could be prefixes thatwe're going to teach maybe in
the morphology routine.
So in on, they might circle on,and then able, and there they
might circle those or any basewords they recognize, and so
that helps them to start as weget into like kind of peeling

(20:46):
off parts of the word theyalready know.
We don't need to attend toevery letter now.
I want them to start unitizinglarger parts.
After you know, we think abouttheir foundational phonics
skills and decoding, and so theycircle the known parts and then
they count the parts.
So they're counting thesyllables based on the number of
vowels, and so we haveunbelievable un-ba-lieve-a-ble.

(21:06):
So they count okay, there'sgoing to be five syllables or
five parts in this word.
Then they're going to break thechunks apart, so they're going
to read un-ba-lieve-a-ble, orwe're going to model that, and
then they're going to read thewhole word aloud and sort of
check it.
Does that sound right?
Right, does that sound right?
Is that word, is that a wordthat I know already in my oral

(21:28):
vocabulary, in my mental lexicon?
And so we're going to modelthat, that, that that strategy.
We're going to think aloud ourprocess a few times.
Provide them some guidedpractice too.
When they go there and they'resort of we're going to we might
give them a word list of wordsthat would work well for the
strategy and different types ofcouple syllables at a time,
maybe words with more morphemes,words with less morphemes, and

(21:50):
have them practice that a lot.
But it's a nice routine becauseit's again we're kind of
training that flexibility there.
It's not this lockstep we mighthave to try.
We're going to model, to beingflexible as teachers model.
Different pronunciations herebe like oh, that doesn't sound

(22:11):
right.
Unbelieve able, oh no, allright, I'm going to flex that
vowel sound.
And so this strategy has beenfound to be pretty effective as
a syllable based strategy withwords that are long and it gives
sort of a kit somewhere forkids to like anchor a little bit
.
That's not rule based, butreally thinking about the actual
premise of English was thatreally every singable has at
least one vowel sound.

Melissa (22:29):
Yeah, I love this idea of being flexible.
My son's in.
He's going into first grade, sohe just finished kindergarten,
so he's right in that spot of.
You know he knows all of themost common sounds that letters
make.
But you know, as we're readingthrough some decodable books,
he'll hit one or he's like whyis this letter making this sound
here?
It blows his little mind.

(22:50):
So I just love this idea ofbeing explicit about teaching
them this flexibility and reallygetting them into that mindset
so they don't get stuck where heis right now.
He's in a good place right now,but you don't want him to stay
there.
You want him to be able to havethat flexibility.

Brennan Chandler (23:06):
Yeah, exactly, I mean, really I always think
about syllabication even morethese days as sort of like an
analogy of navigating citystreets, so like if one road is
blocked, we need alternateroutes as readers, and so sort
of a rules-only approach mightjust give you one map, but
English, we love detours, we'requasi-regular in our language
and so we want to make sure thatwe have sort of backup, sort of

(23:27):
strategies.
We're testing pronunciationsand we really have to model that
sometimes, especially with kidswith reading disabilities or
dyslexia, to sort of show themhow to be a strategic decoder
when the only way we know mightnot be the right way.
That road might be blocked forus to read that word.

Melissa (23:44):
I love that roadblock.
Yeah, you can even use thatwith students.
I feel like that would makesense for them.
It's like, oh, we hit aroadblock, we're just going to
try another way.
Right, there's just another wayto go.
And, jessica, you're going totalk to us a little bit about
morphology, which I'm reallyinterested in, because when you
all were talking about whymultisyllabic words were so, you
know, were difficult, I waslooking at the word
multisyllabic and I was thinking, oh, if a student was reading

(24:07):
this.
They might just read mole andthen tis yeah, and then you know
it throws off the whole word.
But if they knew multi and sawthat and knew that was you know
the morphology of that word andknew it was a prefix there, that
would help them tremendouslyfor this really long word.
So can you talk a little bitmore about morphology and how it
can help students with decoding?

Jessica Toste (24:30):
Absolutely so.
This routine really teachesstudents to identify and
manipulate morphemes, sothinking about prefixes,
suffixes, base words and reallysupporting them in that,
improving their multislavic wordreading and also their
vocabulary, their understandingof the meaning of words.

(24:51):
And this routine, like theothers that Brennan was talking
about, really the goal ofgetting students more strategic
and flexible also really helpsthem when they come across those
roadblocks or the barriers thatthey will come across as we
move and as we develop asreaders, and it can be very

(25:12):
frustrating when you don't knowhow to access a word or you say
it and it's incorrect, and sothis is a good way of helping
them understand that Englishrequires us to be flexible in
the way that we read and accesswords.
So all of these kind of helpstudents get there in a

(25:36):
morphology routine reallyrecognize that a lot of the
words, as I mentioned right atthe beginning that students are
reading in intermediate gradetext are multi-morphemic in
nature and so we're moving intothese words that have different
structures to them and we needto think about how to access
those structures.
Students with difficulties inreading and language tend to
have lower levels ofmorphological awareness, so to

(25:57):
show recognition of these partsof words and this morpheme
instruction reduces theoverwhelm of all those things we
talked about earlier that makemultisyllabic words so
challenging.
It helps students create sortof smaller parts or chunks of
words, that the whole thingtogether.
If I look at the wordmultisyllabic, that might be

(26:18):
unfamiliar to me as a word, butthere's parts of that word that
I might have familiarity withalready and know how to decode,
and then I can put that togetherand make meaning and decode the
word successfully.
So there are kind of three bigthings in a morphology routine
that are helpful for students.
One is teaching them highfrequency affixes, so teaching

(26:41):
those prefixes and suffixes inisolation, and I'll explain this
a little more in a moment.
But that peel off strategyhelps students practice exactly
what I was saying beforerecognizing smaller chunks of
words and successfully decodingthose chunks and then reading

(27:04):
the whole word.
And then the third part of amorphology routine is really
building words.
So a lot of practice withbuilding words and then reading
those long big words as they putthem together.
So the first thing is teachingthose high-frequency affixes so
what are the most commonprefixes and suffixes that we

(27:25):
use in the English language andteaching students those in
isolation, so teaching them preP-R-E, making sure they see what
it looks like, how it's spelled.
They say it.
We think of words we alreadyhave familiarity with that we
use on a daily basis that startwith pre and we provide them

(27:46):
with a definition.
And in word connections wefocus on definitions of words,
of affixes, sorry that are highutility and transparent, so ones
that if I know pre-means before.
That's extremely useful to meas a reader and a comprehender
and it's also very transparentpre-means before.

(28:08):
That's easy to explain.
Some affixes, especiallysuffixes, are less transparent
in their definition.
So they really have they servea linguistic purpose in changing
the function of the word butthey don't necessarily have like
a definition that I couldexplain to a student in six
words or less.
So really focus on defining theaffixes that are going to help

(28:31):
me as a reader make sense ofwhat I'm reading and students
consistently kind of referringback and practicing reading
those affixes in isolation andthen, as they get more
comfortable with them, alsoreferring to the prefixes and
suffixes to help them makemeaning from words too.
So if they're seeing a new wordthat has pre in it, reminding

(28:53):
them like remember pre meansbefore word that has pre in it.
Reminding them like, rememberpre means before.
So what do you think preheatmight mean?
Or what do you think pre Ican't even think of another pre
word in this moment I'm on thespot but what do you think
whatever might mean.
So getting them to integratethis knowledge as they keep
building it.
The second thing I mentioned wasteaching a peel-off strategy.

(29:14):
So the idea of seeing amulti-syllabic word and being
able to identify and peel offpieces of the word.
So peel off the prefixes andsuffixes and read those in
isolation and then use thatknowledge to then blend those
parts together.
So oftentimes if I'm doing thiswith students I'll kind of show

(29:36):
them the parallel betweenserial decoding that they've
learned in foundational skillsinstruction.
So if I see H-A-T, h-a-t, h-a-t, if I see a multisyllabic word
and I say the prefix, say thebase word, say the suffix, then
I can do the same thing.
I can say each part and blendit together and say it fast.

(29:56):
So a peel-off strategy wouldhave students kind of look at a
multi-syllabic word, go throughall of the word or multiple
words if we're practicing andcircle or underline or isolate
in some way every prefix andevery suffix that I see and make
sure that I can read those,then being able to read the
entire word by putting togetherthe parts that I see and make

(30:17):
sure that I can read those, thenbeing able to read the entire
word by putting together theparts that I now have had kind
of I've given myself support inreading some of these parts.
And then this becomes, as wepractice this a lot, it becomes
something that's very easy togeneralize.
I see a new multisyllabic wordthat I've never read before and
right away I know, well, I knowthat part at the beginning.
I know that that says theexample you gave for

(30:39):
multisyllabic.
I know that says multi.
Okay, so I know that.
Oh, I see at the end it saysick.
So now I just need to figureout what's happening in the
middle and say this whole word.
So it gives me a lot.
It gives me a lot ofinformation that I may not have
been attuned to before when Ifirst saw this big word in front
of me.
And then the last is doing avariety of different approaches

(31:03):
to practicing, kind of combiningaffixes and word parts to read
words.
So this can be done like just astructured practice with
reading lists.
It can also be done in avariety of kind of engaging
games that just give us like aquick pace practice to take a
prefix and add a base word to itand then read the whole word.

(31:25):
Take a suffix, add a base wordto it, read the whole word and
then you can switch out as well.
So I often think folks who arelistening, who have used like
foundational skills programs,you think about when you're
teaching students short vowelsounds and you may have reviewed
all the short vowel sounds andthen you're now getting into the

(31:46):
early decoding and you have theconsonants P and T and so you
show them P-A-T, p-a-t, and yousay, well, what happens if I
take out the A and you move awaythat letter and I put in a I?
Now what word is it?
P-i-t?
So I do the same.
I teach kind of as I'm changingone piece of this word.
It gives me all thisinformation on how to pronounce

(32:08):
the new word.
Same thing is true aboutmultisyllabic words.
If I have preheat, okay, I cansay preheat successfully.
What happens if I take out heatand I add in own pre-own?
What happens if I take out ownand add in another word vent,
prevent?
So it's a similar approach.
You're kind of scaling it upand supporting students and

(32:30):
understanding that they have alot of approaches already to do
this.
They just need support intransferring that and
generalizing it to bigger partsfirst of all, and more complex
things happening within thesewords.
That's the very scientific wayof saying it.
The more complex thing.

Melissa (32:51):
And I know that like these little, these games where
you have students build wordswith different parts of the
words, it can be really fun forstudents.
I feel like it's like you knowthey're playing, they're playing
around with words and they getto, like you know, see what
works.
And and I know that I feel likethat's when you see some like
aha moments in students and Isay students, but honestly, for

(33:11):
me too, you know you're oh mygosh that you know that prefix
goes with that because it meansthis and it's like oh, this is
so cool.
Like it's when I feel like it'swhen you can get kids to see
that, like there's some coolstuff happening in our language.

Jessica Toste (33:25):
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean I always say everybodyloves word games.
I don't know if that's truethat everybody loves them.
I guess because I love them alot.
I guess because I love them alot.
But I mean, if you just look atthe popularity of Wordle over
the last several years, likepeople generally like word games
and so turning things thisknowledge that's so important
into just like the really cool,fun ways you can play with

(33:48):
language and words.

Melissa (33:50):
Yeah, and one more thing I just wanted to ask you
about this morphology.
I'm guessing we still need tokeep that flexibility, like when
we were talking about with thesyllables, because even when you
were talking about pre, I wasthinking, okay, well, what about
, like president, you know, likeyou wouldn't say pre-cident.
So I'm imagining you still wantto teach students that you know
we still have to be flexiblehere.
You might still see those threeletters together, but it might

(34:13):
not mean it Like, would youagree?

Jessica Toste (34:19):
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think where theflexibility part comes in, this
is where it's so important tokind of keep coming back to this
idea of being flexible.
President's, a great examplewhere a student might see that
word and our inclination mightbe to immediately be like, oh
well, that's, you know they, ifwe're doing a peel off strategy,
they might recognize P-R-Estrategy.

(34:42):
They might recognize P-R-E andour inclination might be to be
like, well, that's not a prefixhere, that's not being a prefix
in this word, which is true.
But if they can pull apart thatpart that P-R-E, say it, then,
as they're blending the wholeword together, use the sort of
flexible vowel strategies thatBrennan was talking about
earlier, they can get to theright word.

(35:03):
So, rather than sort of notgive them the extra information
anytime they're sort of it'slogical to use affixes, but
anytime we can sort of chunkparts together as readers in new
long words, that helps us getto decoding of the whole word.
So I think if they were doinglike an explicit morphology

(35:25):
routine and they circled P-R-Eas a prefix, I might encourage
them to sort of say it, blend it, and then say, well, that
doesn't sound quite right, let'sflex it and see if we can get
to the right pronunciation, andthen I'd probably add in later
to let them know like oh, inthis word, pri actually is in a
prefix, isn't that interesting?

Melissa (35:47):
Yeah, that's great.
I love bringing together thedifferent routines, so they're
not you know they're notseparate, they all work together
, absolutely, yeah, yeah.
And I think we have one moreroutine which is all about
fluency the oral reading fluencyroutine, and we're excited to
hear about this because we talkall the time about how important
, you know, repeated reading isand a lot of fluency routines
are.
So I'm wondering how they tiein with this multisyllabic word

(36:09):
reading.

Jessica Toste (36:11):
Yeah, I mean.
So one of the most importantparts in reading instruction and
then especially in readingintervention for students who
have difficulties and need kindof a little bit more of a
structured approach to getfluent, is that we're always
supporting transfer from youknow, letter sounds to words, to

(36:32):
connected text, whether thatconnected text is a sentence or
a passage, putting those wordsinto connected text.
And then the same is true ifwe're working on multisyllabic
words, focusing on affixes orword parts, whole an extremely
important part of becoming asuccessful reader.
So we want students to haveopportunities to do that,

(37:10):
ideally, opportunities where theteacher will be present and be
able to give them suggestions orfeedback or corrections as
needed.
And so using any kind of oralreading fluency practice helps
students become more fluent withconnected text.
It helps them apply whatthey've learned in more
efficient kind of like quickapplication of those skills, and

(37:35):
it gets them more confidentsort of transferring the skills
they've learned as they move tothe things they're going to be
reading in class all the time.
So when we think about this, wewant students to have text,
ideally, if we're working onmultisyllabic words, text that
has a lot of multisyllabic wordsin it.
The difficulty with this is, ifa student has a reading

(37:57):
disability or dyslexia orthey've had struggles, is that
sometimes the connected text,the passages we choose for them,
match their reading level andas we're making text kind of
more easy to access and moreeasy to read, they tend to have
fewer multisyllabic words.
And so if you have students whoare in intervention and we're
choosing passages that matchtheir instructional level, it

(38:21):
may have very, very fewmultisyllabic words in order to
keep kind of the readabilityfactor down for them.
So in some of our work we'vetaken text and we've added more
multisyllabic words, trying tomake sure the text remains
readable for them but reallygives them as many opportunities

(38:41):
as possible to read thesecomplex words in connected text
and these routines can look like.
You can apply these in a varietyof ways.
When we're reading passages,commonly you'll select a passage
whatever passages you'reworking with In Word Connections

(39:02):
we've written a variety ofpassages, but you can also use
content area text, so fromsocial studies or science or
things that are already beingused in the classroom and as
students dive in, you'll want tokind of pre-select and teach
them some keywords that theymight need to know and,
depending on who your studentsare.
You could select themulti-syllabic words as the

(39:22):
keywords that you teach.
So these are the words that aregoing to be a little bit tricky
in the text, so let's reviewthem first.
You may choose.
I commonly will choose keywordsthat are like the driving,
meaningful words of the passage.
So you really need to knowthese words to understand what
this passage is all about.
Or you might choose a keywordthat's just like a really

(39:43):
uncommon word, like studentsprobably haven't been reading
this word in many other thingsthat they've seen in previous
classes, so I'm going to makesure you know what that word is
before we dive in.
After we pre-teach some keywords, we'll get into reading the
text.
So, whether it's sentences orpassages, you'll want to do some

(40:04):
repeated readings of those.
So an opportunity for studentsto read the text at least twice
so that they can read throughthe first time and the second
time, have more familiarity withthe words.
They can focus more on kind oftheir fluency with reading that
text.
If it's a passage, they canfocus more on their prosody in
reading that text.
If it's a passage, they canfocus more on their prosody in
reading that text and it justgives them an opportunity to

(40:27):
have more practice, to get morefeedback and to become more
confident in the way thatthey're moving into passages
which are complex.
They're complex and moving fromisolated things to big passages
, complex and moving fromisolated things to big passages.
And then the other thing I'd addin if you're reading passages

(40:50):
to ask questions at the end,that sort of support like a
check for understanding.
And if the goal of theinstruction right now, like if
you're doing a multi-Slavic wordreading intervention, you don't
want to spend like 10 minutesasking questions and getting
into comprehension checks, butyou want to always ask questions
at the end of reading a passageto make sure students remember
the point of reading a passageis to take meaning from it, is

(41:11):
to make sure I understand whatI'm reading.
So even if our goal right nowis decoding and fluency and
making sure you're reading wordsaccurately, I still want to
remind you you should still bemaking sure that you understand
what you're reading as we go.
So at the end you can ask asimple question of just like
what happened or what was thisabout?
Or did you you know, what doyou think was the best part of

(41:34):
this story or what was the mostinteresting thing you learned
and those questions are also agood way to link back to word
analysis questions so you canget to questions about the
keywords that you were talkingabout before you read, or
questions about complex wordsthat you see in the passage.
So, like I see this word, likethis is a really tricky word.

(41:54):
It has it's really long.
There's both a prefix and asuffix in this word.
Like what was the prefix, whatwas the suffix?
How did you read this word?
Like what was the prefix, whatwas the suffix?
How did you read this word?
Like, how did you attackreading this word?
So it's a good opportunity tobring it back to paying
attention to aspects of thewords that could have been
tricky for them.

Lori (42:14):
Yeah, I love this idea of thinking about the routines to
support and using the routinesto support other routines.
Right, like, if I'm in oneroutine and I'm like, oh okay,
like now maybe I'm trying tothink about the ones you shared,
so perhaps I'm starting withthe syllabication routine, and
then I noticed, oh, I shouldshould be thinking also about
that morphology routine.

(42:34):
I can bring that in right.
So these aren't likenecessarily separate, but they
can also be used separately.
Um, I I want to think about acouple of questions I have.
Um, is one routine perhaps moreimportant than the other?
I heard you know we startedwith that essential routine.
Is this like, are we startingwith that?

(42:54):
Is that just one?
We want to make sure studentshave a foundation.
Um, should we use a specificroutine with certain words?
I'm trying to just think about,like as a teacher, just very
practically, you know, in myclassroom, these practical
questions that come to mind.
So, brennan, I'm going to turnit over to you.
Tell us about these routines.

Brennan Chandler (43:17):
Yeah, no, that's a great question and we
love using routines just inteaching too, because they
really can keep instructionsnappy, structured, predictable.
Students know what to expect,we know what to expect as
teachers and we can really stayfocused on the learning.
And that being said, we cansort of do we can think about
like routine stacking in a waytoo, of like be thinking about
logistics of implementing theseroutines.

(43:38):
So for most of these again,these are like the active
ingredients in goodmultisyllabic word reading
instruction.
When we talk about wordconnections more, these are all
sort of embedded and laid outfor you, but it really depends
on sometimes the students, thewords and also the logistics of
the classroom.
You're in, that essentialskills routine really is
essential and it's a coupleminute warmup for kids and a lot

(44:00):
of kids, even some adults right, is essential and it's a couple
minute warmup for kids and alot of kids, even some adults
right when we're spelling, kindof to exercise all these variant
correspondence that we have.
So we can probably spare acouple minutes to add in that
essential skills routine.
And then there's somesimilarities with the morphology
routine and the syllabicationroutine and so both of those are
sort of attack, the peel offstrategies kind of close to that
, that eshlav or every syllablehas at least one vowel.

(44:22):
We peel off meaningful parts onthat routine too, and so when I
think about those routines andthose, those word attack
strategies, we can think thenabout the words, and so some
words might be better suited forthat syllabication or every
syllable has at least one vowelroutine when students don't know
the word or it doesn't haveeasily recognizable morphemes,
and so we can focus on thenbreaking that into pronounceable

(44:46):
chunks, so like words likerelevant or a volcano those
don't have a lot of like highutility morphemes we're going to
be teach.
So I might use that routine anddo like a strategy sort of five
to 10 minute session on thiswith those types of words with
syllabication.
But when we think about wordslike reconstruction or
transportation, we'll probablylean into more of that, just

(45:06):
that peel off strategy there.
But so we can think about thosetwo the morphology and
syllabication kind ofinterchangeable, thinking about
your students, thinking aboutthe kinds of words you're using.
We have a lot of researchshowing how incredible and
important morphology andmorphological awareness is, and
so I'd rather lean on that a lotmore because it is transferable
.
Think about science and socialstudies and all these words

(45:28):
they're coming into that havethose morphines in them.
But really one we don't want tosort of throw the wayside is
the oral reading fluency.
So, like Jess said, we wantthem to transfer and generalize
all the knowledge they'relearning at that connected text
level.
It's really, really importantfor them to generalize that
knowledge, to get feedback inreal time from a teacher not

(45:50):
independent reading Right,they're there, they're with you,
you can see how they areapplying these strategies in
connected text and sort of youcan prompt them through that and
so we shouldn't be scared ofthat part.
We really want to make surethat's there and there's so many
easy ways, as I just talkedabout, we can kind of make sure
that can be embedded acrosscontent areas too.
You can come up with in WordConnections.

(46:12):
We have some really funpassages that we use with kids
that are question-answer format,that are really high interest,
and so we want to make sure thatwe're giving them access some
of that, some of that stretchtext and that's not purely
decodable that they have hadoften in their foundational
phonics program.
That's very, very controlled.
We want them.
You know these words are alittle different, right, we're

(46:33):
not going to.
We're not going to know everysingle word.
We want them to sort of stretchtheir reading muscles so they
become these flexible, strategicdecoders when they read, when
they encounter these words intext.

Lori (46:44):
Yeah, that's really helpful.
I feel like often you know youmentioned highlighting the
importance of morphology Oftenmorphology is tricky when we're
teaching it because there's somuch involved.
You have to do pre-work as ateacher and I often find myself
asking myself okay, what part ofthis is, is the morphology part

(47:12):
that I want to teach?
And then is it actually goingto work all the way through
right?
So, like taking myself throughthe routine that you, you shared
, brennan, can this word take usthrough the routine?
I'm trying to think of a wordbecause I think sometimes I go
back and forth between amorphology routine and a
syllabication routine to figureout if the word is one that can

(47:32):
be used in that specific routine.
Am I making sense?
I feel like it's a struggle asa teacher.

Brennan Chandler (47:40):
Yeah, no, I think you make a lot of sense.
And what I'll say too toteachers is that I always want
to go for clarity overlinguistic precision.
So we talk about is this amorpheme in this word, actually
A clear morpheme?
Is it a part of the base?
We can really be flexibleourselves in that.
I think, teaching kids how tobe flexible readers, we have to
model a lot of flexibilityourselves, and so we don't need

(48:00):
to be linguists ourselves reallyto go over, go, go for clarity
over that linguistic precision.
If you think there are somehighly transparent morphemes in
the word, like photosynthesis,maybe, right, that might be a
good one.
But if you're like askingyourself, eh, maybe you go for
the syllabication, maybe theypeel off parts they know, right,
so, um, I don't think we should.
Um, we don't have to think soup, we don't have to think, we
don't have to like get out, youknow, go on, get a textbook, go

(48:22):
through all these sort of thingsabout was this a morpheme?
Is it's not, is it derivational, inflectional, um, that's why
programs can be so great too,because you can just pick one up
and use it and kind of helpsyou through that.
But, um, when in doubt, kind of,go with your gut and don't
think we don't need to think toohard about on this, because
it's going to trip kids up tooif we're thinking about oh, is
this the?
Yeah, I don't know if this is amorpheme, is it?
I don't know.
So just be flexible and go forclarity whenever possible.

(48:46):
I think is a good.
It's a good, probably, way tobe with a lot of these things
here.

Jessica Toste (48:51):
Yeah, I would add .
Britton said it really well.
I would add to kind of Melissaasked about like the word
president before and like pre isnot a prefix there, and I think
what I was talking about thereis kind of goes into the answer
that Brennan just gave.
This idea of our goal here isfor students to become efficient

(49:12):
readers so that they can thenput their effort into making
sense of the passage and gettingknowledge and information from
the text that they're reading.
And so there's there's a littlebit of a trade off and it's
hard.
Like I am for sure a word nerd.
I am trained as a teacher anddelivering very explicit phonics
programs.

(49:32):
I love getting into like I'mlike let me talk to you for 10
minutes about this likelinguistic concept that I think
is so cool in all of these words.
But I mean they're not taking alinguistics exam at the end of
their fifth grade year, right?
They just need to be able toread these words to understand

(49:54):
and to gain knowledge and to beable to read content area text.
And so there's a trade-off.
Sometimes, especially if youhave knowledge or and if you're
gaining all this linguisticsknowledge, feels really hard to
not just like say it out loud.
You really want to.
You really want to explainthings, but sometimes there's a
trade-off of like is that thebest use of our instructional

(50:14):
time right now?
Is that going to help themunderstand how to apply this in
future?
Or is just being able to read aword part flex it to get to a
proper pronunciation?
Is that going to be aneffective way for them to get
you know to reading multi-Slavicwords?
I often will like err on theside of simplicity and clarity,

(50:37):
like Brennan mentioned, and then, as students are learning more,
you can kind of drop in littletidbits as well too.
Like you know, you're erring onthe side of simplicity and
clarity to get studentsefficient in reading these words
, and then you can add otherpieces of knowledge as well,
like oh, by the way, like thisis a suffix here, or you know
this, whatever, whatever rulethat you know that they don't

(51:00):
necessarily have to memorize andthink about all the time, but
you can add in as a little otherpiece of information that might
be helpful for them.

Lori (51:08):
Yeah, that's so helpful.
I often find myself sayingthings very generally,
especially to older kids, likeoh, that's neat, I noticed this
isn't that neat, and justpointing it and moving on,
because it seems to just be veryefficient, And're rolling their
eyes anyway right At some point.
So well, at least my own childis, so I'll speak for myself my

(51:30):
own teenagers.

Melissa (51:32):
Yeah, this is all amazing and you read my mind
when you were talking aboutmiddle school students, because
throughout this whole time Iactually taught middle school
and high school.
So, as you all were talkingabout it, I was like this is the
support my students needed.
Like they needed thismulti-syllabic word reading
support, but there was never anytime.
I mean, I was lucky if I hadmore than 45 minutes with my

(51:55):
students myself and there wasnever any intervention, blocks
or extra support times reallybuilt in.
And so I'm just wondering ifare there any like?
Do you all have any tips?
I think, brendan, you mighthave some of how we can like fit
this kind of instruction into aday for students in middle and
high school.

Brennan Chandler (52:14):
Yeah, definitely, but sort of before I
get there, I want to piggybackthat, like these foundational
skills, really they don't havean expiration date, and so if
students can't read the words,they're not going to read the
text, and so even trying to talkto your administrator or
anybody you know, at thedistrict level too, about
getting some some districts callit now the middle and high
school level like wind time orany sort of RTI intervention

(52:35):
time, is going to be helpful.
When we were all talking, Ithought about this, this study
that Freddie Hebert did in 2022and estimated that about 80% of
the kids who score belowproficient on our national exam
of reading really havedifficulties with this
multi-Slavic word reading, andso 80% would probably benefit
from a lot of the stuff that wetalked about today that aren't

(52:57):
meeting that proficient level.
Aren't meeting that proficientlevel.
But right now, the reality istime.
Is this limited commodity inthe upper elementary secondary
grades, which is often what wefind to be a really big barrier
to implementation, is time.
I mean, we're looking at someword connections, data right now
, and it's like it really is allabout the time to implement,
and so we can think of these twoas sort of like an MTSS model,

(53:19):
Like, let's say, like core, ourtier one instruction, tier two
and even really tier three.
But we can think flexibly andfit some of these routines even
into like core instruction.
And so I was actually last yearworking with a teacher closely
who had a large amount ofstudents struggle on the state
reading test I think 45% of herstudents.

(53:40):
She taught seventh grade ELA,middle school, just classroom
teacher didn't meet state levelproficiency and so, and she
didn't have a dedicatedintervention block, and so we
kind of workshopped and wovesome of these routines into her
ELA lessons and so she had a 45minute block every day with
these students.
We said, okay, that's seven to10 minutes of the day that we

(54:00):
can sort of use some of theseroutines to support them.
And I remember that the novelshe was working to was a long
walk to water.
And so we kind of we looked atthe week, thought about some of
the students skill profiles andthey really a lot of them did
struggle with the word reading.
And so, for example, on Mondaywe're like all right, let's do
like a quick morphology Monday,let's pull some morphemes from

(54:20):
that week's reading of the text.
Let's say like on instruct,spend some time breaking them
down with students beforereading, kind of just teaching
them explicitly.
Here's some morphemes we'regoing to see.
Here's sort of okay, they kindof built their own affix bank in
a way of their I think theyhave like an interactive ELA
notebook.
They kind of jotted the affixesdown so that way when they read
the text that day and they hitsome of those more themes, it

(54:40):
kind of it kind of unpacked thema little bit.
Right, it's not, it's sort of aclass wide intervention.
So at this point it's not likesuper targeted, but it kind of
helped them, support them inbreaking down some of these big
words and it was connected tothe content, which is really
really helpful.
And so we did that on Monday.
We had a couple of days where wehad the syllabication.
It was like a five to 10 minutejust strategy session, sort of.

(55:02):
Here's what we do when we cometo a big word we don't know.
Provided them like with a listof words, kind of practice that
whole class.
But really the key, the nicething about the routines is
you're not going to spend a ton.
You don't need to spend a tonof time on really any of them,
right, and so we can kind ofthink about how to customize and
put these in when we have likea bell ringer or at the end of
class and we have some time tosort of hit on these things as

(55:22):
well.
The last thing I'll say Iremember Friday we did like a
fluency Friday she had, you know, she kind of partnered students
up with text, thinking aboutlike peer assisted reading, so
how they would one would be thereader, one would be the coach.
They would switch, you know, andkind of prompt each other and
use some of these strategies wetalked about, like, oh, let's

(55:47):
make it a real word, make it aword.
You know that you've heardbefore type of thing and so it's
not perfect but we can sort ofintegrate some of these into
core, Even thinking about wordconnections and adapting.
That may be supplemental inthese grades.
Like, maybe, if you are aspecial ed teacher at the middle
or high school levels which isa lot of the teachers I work
with that are in the graduateprogram I work with are special
ed teachers in the middle andsecondary level and are often
required to do more of aco-teaching situation or push-in

(56:08):
and so teaching them andproviding them ways to how to
kind of adapt if you have 20 or30 minutes and how to sort of
just adapt a program like WordConnections.
Pull a group to the back of the, to the back table in the class
, do a lesson or half a lessonwith them and pick it up the
next day and sort of rotate.
That way Really can be done.
The key it really is thinkingflexibly and then really

(56:30):
thinking as you get kids thatreally do struggle all right,
what are their actual skilldeficits and what's the most
efficient way that we can getthem access to these words that
we know are really important toread.

Lori (56:41):
I feel like this episode.
I'm going to have to listen toit myself at least three to five
times.
This is pure gold.
As we come to a close here, I'mcurious if there's anything
you'd like to just very brieflyleave our listeners with about
reading multi-syllabic words.
Just some final thoughts, sure.

Jessica Toste (57:00):
I mean, I think to me one of the most important
things that I talk about is justrecognizing that students do
need this continued instructionin the intermediate grades and
beyond that.
These words present new anddifferent challenges than
they've seen in kindergarten,first grade, second grade, as

(57:23):
they've sort of been developingearly reading skills and we
generally assume that as we'vebecome efficient in reading
those words in the primarygrades, that if students have
not had any difficulty orthey've responded really well to
intervention, that now they'regoing to transition very easily
into reading multisyllabic wordsand more complex words.

(57:45):
And I think it's reallyimportant to recognize that
students in the upper elementarygrades need instruction to
understand how to be flexiblewith these words and that
students who have difficultiesare going to need continued
intervention to help them beflexible.
And making sure that students,especially those who have been

(58:06):
in intervention for many years,not keeping them in foundational
skills programs because theyseem to not yet be totally
fluent.
So if we do assessments theirfluency is not where we want it
to be and a lot of times we keepthose students in foundational
skills interventions withoutrecognizing that sometimes they

(58:28):
know most of those skills.

Brennan Chandler (58:30):
What they need now are strategies to help them
kind of bridge forward intoother kinds of words yeah, and
I'll say it one more timebecause we haven't said enough
this entire episode butflexibility really is the key
for teachers, for us to model Ithink really important and the
students, because in the realworld, when we're reading these

(58:50):
big words, they don't play bythe rules and really our
students need more than one wayto land one rule, one strategy.
We have to be flexible asteachers ourselves.

Lori (58:59):
Well, thank you both so much.
We couldn't have asked for abetter conversation with such
practical advice.
Thank you both so much forbeing here with us and our
listeners.

Brennan Chandler (59:09):
Thank you.

Melissa (59:13):
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Lori (59:22):
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Melissa (59:33):
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 (59:44):
We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to
learn with us.