Rethinking Nonsense Words

Join Dr. Gina Pepin as she unpacks the hot topic of nonsense words in early literacy! Originally created as an assessment tool to gauge students' decoding skills, nonsense words have made their way into daily instruction—but is this really best for our young readers? In this episode, Dr. Pepin explores the history, purpose, and unintended consequences of practicing nonsense words, including how it can affect the developing brain and even slow down progress for fluent readers. Tune in to learn why meaningful, authentic reading experiences are essential and discover actionable strategies for supporting your students’ real reading growth. If you’re ready to reflect on your instructional toolkit and do what’s best for kids, this episode is for you!

Check out more at: www.ginapepin.com

Transcript

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Welcome back to Let's Talk Teacher to Teacher. I'm Dr. Gina Puppet, and today we're taking a deeper look at a familiar piece of the early literacy landscape, nonsense words. If you've spent any time in primary classrooms or delved into reading assessments, chances are you've encountered these quirky made-up words like lat or flim. But have you ever wondered where this practice actually came from and what it's actually meant to measure? And most importantly, how it affects our young readers. Well, let's dive in. Nonsense words have an interesting origin story in reading education. They weren't created as a fun class activity or a way to stump our students. In fact, they were designed purely as an assessment tool, an efficient way for educators to check how well students can decode words using their knowledge of letter sound correspondences. So rather than relying just on memory. The idea was simple. If a child can sound out a word they've never seen before, one that isn't in their vocabulary, that's powerful evidence of their decoding skills. But somewhere along the line, these assessment tools began creeping into our day-to-day reading instruction. Practice packets, flashcards, reading lists. Suddenly students were spending instructional minutes, sometimes even homework time, practicing nonsense words. And this brings me to a crucial point. Practicing nonsense words is not an instructional strategy. The science is clear. Our brains, and especially our young learners' brains, thrive on meaningful patterns. When students repeatedly practice reading nonsense words, they're not just learning to decode. They're wiring their brains to expect language that doesn't make sense. One area this can impact is the visual word form area. It's a critical part of the brain that recognizes familiar words quickly and supports fluent reading. By focusing on words that have no semantic meaning, words they'll never see in a real book, we actually risk hindering the development of this vital neural pathway. Instead of strengthening their ability to recognize and remember real words, we're pulling them backwards. We're reinforcing patterns that aren't supportive of authentic reading. This issue becomes even more apparent for students who have already cracked the code and can read real words. For them, being asked to read nonsense words isn't just unhelpful, it's actually counterproductive. It's like asking a runner who's just learned a sprint to go back to practicing with backward steps. It totally disrupts the natural progression their brains have made from decoding to fluent, automatic word recognition. So what's the takeaway for teachers? Let's return nonsense words to their intended role as a diagnostic tool, a quick check-in to gather data about decoding, not as a skill to drill or practice. Instead, let's invest instructional time in reading real words, sentences, and stories that carry meaning, context, and joy. The best way for students to strengthen their reading brains is to read and make sense of meaningful language over and over and over again. Thank you so much for joining me today on Let's Talk Teacher to Teacher. Let's continue to be critical consumers of our instructional practices, always putting our students' development and love of reading first.