Denise Eide, author of Uncovering the Logic of English, helps us understand the logic of English! It actually makes a lot of sense... and can help your students learn to read and spell.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
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Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
Denise Eide, author of Uncovering the Logic of English, helps us understand the logic of English! It actually makes a lot of sense... and can help your students learn to read and spell.
Takeaways
Resources
We wrote a book! The Literacy 50-A Q&A Handbook for Teachers: Real-World Answers to Questions About Reading That Keep You Up at Night
Don't miss an episode! Sign up for FREE bonus resources and episode alerts at LiteracyPodcast.com
Helping teachers learn about science of reading, knowledge building, and high quality curriculum.
You are listening to Melissa and Lori Love. Literacy Students are really good at pointing out when the English language breaks the rules, and we teachers often say things like English is just full of exceptions. Well, after reading the book on covering the logic of English, we realize that English actually makes a lot of sense. Today's guest is author Denise Ide, and she will share her knowledge about the English language and how knowing the logic behind our language can help you teach your students to read and spell.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Lori and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We work together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.
Lori:We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing.
Melissa:Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Lori Love Literacy Today. We can't wait to talk with our guests because we are going to learn all about how the English language actually is very logical and we have a great guest for that.
Melissa:Today we're here with Denise Ide, who is the author of Uncovering the Logic of English For those watching the video this is the book right here.
Lori:Mine's in the kitchen. I don't even have mine to hold up, Melissa.
Melissa:And she's also the founder and CEO of Logic of English, which we'll talk all about today. So welcome, denise. Thank you for having me. And we want to jump in with just. You know, lori and I actually got to see you present last week at the Plain Talk Conference and you know Lori asked a question Like how does someone learn so much about the English language, like how does she know all of this? So we wanted to ask you just to start us off with like how did, how did you get to this point of learning so much and wanting to share with others about the actual English language?
Denise Eide:Well, sure. So, like so many people in the literacy space, it all began with my own children who struggled with reading and I can read curriculum like it's a novel. So I had twin boys who were struggling with reading for several years and I began just buying books about reading, buying curriculum, trying things with them. And I found a book in the OG kind of family of curriculum and as I'm turning the pages I'm like what C says two sounds I didn't know that that would have helped all my adult literacy students that I had taught in a prior career.
Denise Eide:What G says two sounds, what this happens before in the EI and why what. There's more than these two reasons for a silent E English words not N and V. And right then, and there I began to make connections to my adult literacy students that I had had, and then I began to use this information to teach my sons and it was amazing. They went from non-readers to readers in the matter of months as they learned to decode because they had strong language comprehension skills. And then I put together this presentation that I called the logic of English, because to me it was all my favorite rules from this kind of curriculum and fast forward. Here we are today because that really caught on, that presentation Resonated with people and that led to the formation of the company and all that you've seen today.
Lori:So Well, I mean, I hate to say that I'm glad that that happened, because I never want children to struggle, but I am glad that it brought you to this point and that you were able to help them, and just so fascinating to hear your story. Thank you for sharing that. One thing that stood out to me is that it was a plain talk last week and in your book on covering the logic of English, like, my big takeaway is all words are decodable, and I'm hoping that you can say a little bit about that, just so that we can help everyone understand our language a bit better.
Denise Eide:Yes, so that was really the awakening Maybe I had as I was reading this curriculum was that there was a. There were a lot of concepts and rules that I didn't know and that made English spelling for me very difficult, english or decoding for my son's very difficult, and since that time I've been able to dig into some of the other research. So in the talk you heard I referenced that as saying as an is is often marked as an exception. So is has in the high frequency words and it would be one thing if isn't has were the only words. But really, if you look closely it actually says more often in the high frequency words than it says.
Denise Eide:And even more astounding is it actually says over 20,000 times in this database called Finder, of a number of where they're able to match the sounds to the letter sound correspondence and look that up. And so there's this misconception in our culture about what the letter sound correspondences are and what a complete set of them are. And then as kids learn to read, we're saying that's an exception, not realizing we're dismissing. Actually, like 46% of the words with an S in it, which is a pretty huge percentage. It's a pretty huge percentage. It's clearly not an exception.
Lori:But it's no one's fault.
Denise Eide:I think we don't take the time to to realize. Wait, I was told this is an exception. Every book teaches this as a sight word. What is the sight word? Instead, it's generated all of this misunderstanding about the language. Yeah, Can we go back to something that you said? You said that it it taught us that it's a mistake.
Lori:You didn't know, like you didn't know those that sound. Well, what about if you inaccurately know it or your knowledge is partial? I'm thinking about my knowledge there In certain quote rules was not whole or was inaccurate, because, as you pointed out at the conference, for one of the rules that you taught, I only learned the first part of the rule, so I had learned the complete rule. So I'm just wondering if you have anything to say about that or to add to that.
Denise Eide:Well, I think that's really where the discussion about reading is right now is right. Everyone reads alphabet books to their kids. Everyone understands that learning the S is helpful. We just don't realize that culturally we're missing that it says the sound 46% of the time and you don't know what you don't know. Instead, we just dismiss these things. I remember English words don't end in V. That was such a big eye opener for me. Every time you hear at the end at an E as in have give comprehensive. I just thought they were all exceptions to the vowel saying it's long sound. But when we start to understand the complete picture of English, it opens up spelling, it opens up decoding and I think something that I've been thinking a lot about is it sparks curiosity and the joy of learning in students, because then they begin to go oh, I see something, what is that? What's happening there? But if we just say, oh, english is crazy, it's riddled with exceptions, we can't get curious, it's just discouraging.
Melissa:Yeah, that's really exciting and I've taken some of what you taught us and already I'm using it with my five year old son. So his letter from last week at preschool was C and so of course they learned it was C, as in cat, and I was just like isn't it cool that it actually has two sounds? I've found all the circle and can't think of any off the top of my head now City.
Melissa:Yeah, we found other words. I was like, isn't that cool. It has two sounds, so I'm really trying to amp it up at home.
Denise Eide:It's everywhere. Once you see it, it's like, oh my goodness, it's everywhere.
Denise Eide:Yeah, and eventually we'll get to the when it says which sound and with emerging readers that's fine, just knowing it says two sounds. And I'm a big advocate of teaching these sounds right from the beginning because, like you're saying with your son, if you learn it says isn't cat, but then you see the word city or you see the word bicycle, it doesn't make sense to go oh, you'll learn that sound in a couple of years. Really, they're encountering that sound in the books and in the texts and in the words around them, so empowering them with that information.
Melissa:And I think you said something in your presentation Some kids can kind of go with the flow and be like oh sure, yeah, see, he has a different sound there. But for other kids that logical like wait a second, you told me it was this Can really throw them off.
Denise Eide:Yeah, I've done a lot of thinking about what is it that helps some students learn it so quickly? And I think, from my own observations and I want to be very careful that these are Denise, ida observations these aren't signs of reading, they're not evidence based, known as put together a study. But my observations are kids need a different amount of the code. So what we'll see is we're teaching what, laurie, you described as a more complete and accurate code. Someone will have 2550% and suddenly they're already reading books. Someone else needs 60, 75% and they have enough to be able to read books. And also, I think there's approximations that we teach.
Denise Eide:I've had this discussion Do we really need to teach the SS? And even though it's 46% of the time in the language? But what I observed is my daughter, who's very intuitive. My guess is, when I said she misread it as is, and I said, no, that's is because in the are formed in the same part of the mouth and their voice and unvoiced pair, my guess is she was very intuitive and was like, ah, close enough, I've got it. But my sons, their little engineers, little science, they were, you know, scientifically minded and they were going to apply that over and over. And I think what's really heartbreaking is that when kids are doing that, they're kind of doing the scientific method, they're testing something out, but they don't realize that it's really the information that they were taught that was mistaken. They usually began to internalize that it's them, and so I think this is where that's also very empowering. And then, likewise, I think, other students right, they still misspell is as IZ, but when they realize actually the most common spelling of SS is the S, that's also very empowering.
Melissa:I'm wondering if you could actually give us some more examples of that I'm thinking of. You know there are teachers out there who might not even though you know we see it all the time. Right, we as adults, we see is and we see has and was. We see all those words but we don't think about that spelling rule, right, we don't think about the different ways to say it. I'm wondering if you have any other examples, like because often we see it as that's an exception, or, you know, the English language is just crazy is how we kind of explain it to kids. Do you have more examples you can share with us of like of the English language and some rules that explain it?
Denise Eide:Absolutely so on the phonetic side. One example I like sharing with adults is that most of us learned that T I O N says Sean, but then we see a word like partial, or confession or confusion, even where you have something else is going on right, and confession and confusion, you have an S I O N and really what's happening here is there's three Latin spellings of. They're spelled T I as in partial, so the word part, it ends in a T and then they're adding a suffix and it reforms partial. So you can look back to that root Confess ends in an S. It's going to be spelled with a LatinS I, s, s, I, s, s, s, I, s, S, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s, s.
Denise Eide:And so understanding this more complete picture it explains, I think one of the problems is this we think of phonics, when we teach incomplete phonics as just for decodable readers, but actually a complete understanding of phonics is what you are referencing at the beginning and it's how we understand how to decode and encode any word in English.
Lori:That's so great. I love that example. It's really helpful. So just to kind of recap, the first is the just my understanding, the T, I made the sound right, the shun and then the SI, but it was voiced and unvoiced, yes, so that actually made two sounds, same spelling. Yes, okay, and that's. I loved it when, um, you shared that at the conference. You shared something similar, but that voice and unvoiced is really really helpful because it does make two different sounds and that's something that I always struggled with when I was teaching phonics, like kids would ask me questions about, like, for example, the word little, and the word little has the two T's in the middle but makes a almost like a sound right, little. So it's really about thinking where your placement is of your tongue in your mouth and what's happening with voiced and unvoiced. Do you want to add anything to that? I think that I'd love to hear what you think about that.
Denise Eide:Yes, and then also sounds are like colors.
Denise Eide:I like to talk about that Like do you know how, when you think of blue, there can be light blue and dark blue and medium shades of blue and ocean blue and sky blue, but we think of them all as blue, and even children see that.
Denise Eide:So there's something called aliphones in English, but really what they are, they're shades of sound, and so that's what you hear in little, and one of the things that I got very interested in was being able to hear Dr Linnea Airee at the Plain Talk conference that we were just at, and she's heard a number of research studies about how kids, when they feel what their mouth is doing as they say words, they're able to then orthographically map or connect that to the spelling more quickly and to the sound more quickly. And so I think, just as educators, I call that a kinesthetic awareness of sounds feeling what your mouth is doing, seeing how it's spelled, drawing the connection, and Duh and T are very close in the mouth. So, yes, sometimes there's little like changes to the sounds right as we speak in the flow of speech, but there's a reason for those spellings too.
Lori:So what I'm hearing you say is there's rules and then there's also reasons, so like rules and reasons for why we do what we do, and I guess there's not a rule for, for example, little Two T's. Does it always say D? No, definitely not. So I think that that's important to think about too. There's rules and then there's reasons for why things are the way they are, and that's what I think you helped us to uncover as we read your book, and so I'm just kind of thinking of how to transition us into this idea that some people are against teaching rules, right?
Lori:Sometimes people are like do kids really need to know the rules? I don't necessarily think of that as these rules that we're talking about here. I think of that more in terms of, I don't know, being able to identify that something is a digraph or something. But if we're thinking about these rules in particular and we're always open to branching off to the other ones, but I just want to be clear, like these rules, that we're talking about the rules of the English language the English language is what should be taught, explicitly versus implicitly.
Denise Eide:Yes, and I think what I'm trying to do, I'm going to set this answer up. I think what I'm trying to do is two things to how people understand English isn't just riddled with exceptions, it's a complex code and there are actually quite a lot of letter, sound correspondences, but I think where we're at in the discussion of science, reading is what should be taught explicitly. What should we teach to mastery to students who are emerging readers, and what can be learned implicitly. What can you just learn by reading? And I think that's where the dialogue is right now and that's what the talk you heard was about. I listened to Soul to Story by Emily Hanford and at the end of Soul to Story, she says that we should eliminate three queuing and I thought to myself I'm going to think through how would we do that? And it's like we have to understand why we queue. We have to ask why do we guess? We guess because we don't know how to teach kids how to decode those words. So when we think about which phonics rules should we teach, we need to look at high frequency words, because students read them frequently, and we need to look at their frequency in the language. So, just going back to the beginning of this presentation as saying is an is an, as an has. It's in a lot of high frequency words, but it's also 20,000 times in this data set and finder. It is very frequent in the language. To me that creates the threshold. We should teach SS and Z explicitly Now.
Denise Eide:In contrast, the phonogram P N in pneumonia and pneumatic and pneumothorax, that's only in an advanced vocabulary. So students who understand this is a phonogram, this makes a sound or multiple sounds when they come across the word pneumonia are going to be able to go Woo, it's a new phonogram. I wonder what language that's from. That said, we shouldn't tell students when they encounter the word pneumonia that's an exception, it's actually not, and that word in particular helps us to also understand.
Denise Eide:English is morpho phonemic. It's a balance of sound and meaning. Sometimes even our phonograms carry meaning and in that word, p N carries the meaning of air. So anytime you see it pneumonia, pneumothorax it has something to do with air and it's saying mm. So I hope that helps to understand and I think this is where the actual discussion is. We all need to be talking. I think a good question to ask curriculum companies and to ask ourselves is is the set of phonograms I'm teaching going to help read high frequency words and read enough of the words on the page that it's not leaving emerging readers just guessing.
Lori:Yeah, that they can read most of the words on the page. Yes, it shouldn't be that they can read, I don't know, five out of 10 words, and then the other ones are words that they're memorizing, or oh, these are not regular, because what I'm hearing you say is they're all regular. They all can be in some way, shape or form. Right, if you wanted to think about it that way, they all can be decoded.
Denise Eide:They almost all can be thought of as regular. So this is where my own thinking has been changing this year. I used to say all the time 98% of English words follow the rules, which was leaving 2%, and so we run a teacher training and over those three and a half days we teach teachers the phonograms, the rules, how to apply them through spelling analysis. They're teaching each other, and where I'm going with this is during that training, on the third day, we give the small groups of teachers all of the dolch words and we dump them out on tables in small groups and we ask them to now categorize them as exceptions or do they follow the rules, and then I lead a discussion where the small groups put them up on a board and in the past that room always came up with there were three or 4% of exceptions, which is fine because the high frequency words are the oldest words, so there's the most exceptions.
Denise Eide:But in 2023, something different happened. So I always have talked about how English is morphofinemic a balance of sound and meaning. But I also began to integrate in for the first time our training that our goal as teachers, our goal as educators, is to help students orthographically map words, to bond the spelling, the sound, the pronunciation and meaning of the word. And we reiterated that theme as we talked about morphology and phonetics. And what happened was that room of almost 90 educators decided that there was really just one exception and it was the word I, as in my eyeball E-Y-E.
Denise Eide:And when I asked them I was like well, what about the number two? And they're like oh, the W means in, two is in twin and twice in 12, it means two. And even though the W is silent, it's not an exception because we know how to teach students how to orthographically map it using morphology. And I stood back and I watched this discussion and I'm still thinking about that because I think that is the real goal to understand language. Well, enough to go. I understand something about dialect, I understand morphology, I understand phonetics, I know how to teach every word in English. Now.
Lori:Can you explain why I is not?
Denise Eide:No, well, there's that silent E at the beginning. That's weird. Maybe the silent E at the end is fine, the Y saying I is fine, but I don't know what to do with that first E either. Yeah, I don't know. I've looked at the etymology, I know how to great answer. But imagine there's 220 dolch words and 95 nouns and out of all the what 310 words they said, there was one word. They didn't know how to teach, how to orthographically map. And again, I think that's the goal. That, to me, is redefining the goal.
Lori:I can do a new mnemonic for it.
Denise Eide:E E Y, yes, yes there you go, and if they are for the graphically map it, that's fantastic.
Lori:Yes, there we go. We have a cool mnemonic for it. If you were listening and not watching, I pointed to each of my eyes and said E, e, and then pointed to my nose and said Y, so by the way, mnemonic with an M, n, m. N.
Melissa:So there's another one. I just wanted to back up to something. Laurie, you were talking about the rules and I just keep thinking about you know, the teachers that I think are saying we should not teach these rules is because the rules don't the rules that they know don't always work right. That's what. That's what I'm hearing is, like the rules, like what's the vowel one? When you put the E at the end, the vowel says its name, is that? So did I get that right? Like hive, right, right, is that what you mean? But then there's all these exceptions right, have?
Lori:use. So I think I think that's why.
Melissa:Because they haven't had this, all the rules, they've just had these ones that don't always work. And well then you're stuck with like, oh well, this is not a very good rule if there's so many exceptions to it, but I know that that's where we get to with uncovering. The logic of English is like you would never give a rule like that, denise. Your rules always have a. You know if it you might do that sometimes, but it also does this and this and this.
Denise Eide:Well, it'll be. There's nine reasons for a silent E. And then we help kids identify why is the E needed. And also, I didn't come up with these. These, as far as I can tell, came from Dr Orton and Anna Gillingham.
Denise Eide:Dr Anna Gillingham and the little bit of research I've been able to look into, what did Anna Gillingham use to identify something as a phonogram or should be a rule? It's frequency and the high frequency words, and it's frequency in the language, and logic of English has tweaked a few of them because we have computers that can pull databases. But that's the heart of all that exists right in the Orton, gillingham's original information. So and I think that's two words really important that we all work together, like logic of English teaches AUGH is in laugh and daughter saying ah. And I did that because the original sources didn't represent women. Well, and so sons were in those high frequency words list but not daughters, and I thought our daughters have to be represented in these phonograms that we're teaching explicitly. And then the word laugh is frequent in children's books too. But if that difference exists in a curriculum and someone wants to teach that differently, that's fine, but the heart and core of this should be the same because of if you use the data to drive those determinations.
Lori:Yeah, and I'm actually thinking maybe I misspoke earlier in terms of like the that digraph example I gave. I'm trying to think about how to say it differently. I'm thinking like, for example, when students are being taught explicit phonics and certain programs have students memorize the parts of words or map like underline or map them and explain them, I'm just wondering if we could kind of unpack that a little bit for like a moment and just think about is that something that is helpful and is that related to what we're talking about?
Denise Eide:Yeah. So we don't ask kids to memorize this as a digraph or a trigraph or any of those sorts of language. We instead learn IGH says I and it's spelled with three letters. But then when we're sounding out words we would say I and I might hold up three fingers to show it spelled with three letter I, and then when they write it we might underline it to show they're working together and take a moment to analyze the word. And one of my goals is to empower students to be able to look at any word and understand phonetically what's happening in it. So word analysis, I think, is really helpful, but you can't teach every word in the language. I mean, a five year old knows 10,000 words when they come to school. We don't teach them to decode an end code all 10,000. I think it's much more efficient to teach students how the language works so they can apply that to every word in their vocabulary and then use that to build their vocabularies.
Lori:OK, that's so helpful and teaching them how the language works and analyzing for a. I feel like it's a higher meaning versus just memorizing that this combination of letters does this. So I love that idea of really asking students to think a little bit more and to analyze what they have in front of them in terms of the words that they're seeing.
Denise Eide:And I used to memorize words. Right, they're spelling L, a, n, g, you know, whatever it was the letter names. Now, every word I look at I see those units of sound. I literally can see what's happening in every word and I think that's what we want for our students right To be able to understand it, not to rotally memorize it.
Melissa:Can I ask you one that I actually saw on the Facebook group this morning, because I don't know if you've ever I don't know if you're on that Facebook group, Denise, but every day it's like why does this word do this? Why is this word spelled this way? You would have a field day on there.
Lori:Well, I think I just tagged Denise in so many comments in the last few days because Everyone's answer is always like uncovering the logic of English.
Melissa:check it out. But one. I don't know the answer because I didn't have time to look it up and see if it was in your book or not. But they're asking about words that end in to TCH, like catch or hitch, and there were a few that end in just CH, but I guess there's only I haven't thought through it, but I guess there's only a few like much rich, and such were the ones that they said.
Denise Eide:I don't know how many there are, but it's true that there's the spelling of TCH, which is three letter TCH, and then there's the two letter TCH. That's at the end as well, and we don't have a rule about that specifically. Maybe we'll discover one. We sometimes actually had students send us rules and patterns that they've observed, and then we're able to use word databases to look it up and see if it actually is regular or not.
Melissa:Yeah, the one thing someone said was that rich comes from French, so then they kept the CH from French. I don't know if that's true or not. Much.
Denise Eide:I would think is a high frequency word in a native English word. So I don't necessarily try to explain every single little thing. The important thing is that a student could read or it rich, or much much. It gets a little trickier for spelling, right? Because but here's the thing If you can spell a word, you know how to read it, but if you know how to read it, you don't necessarily know how to spell it. So there's a level of mastery there. And then trying to develop that mastery by going oh, it's three letter TCH in that word and catch and pointing that out. We create spelling journals this way, so it's organized by sound. So, for example, with CH, there would be CH and TCH and they would collect words with those spellings. Well, we know TCH is never at the beginning, that's only at the end. So there's some rules like that that we can put in there. But at the same time, that's the trickiest part is learning to spell when there's multiple options for spelling.
Melissa:That's really helpful. So teachers don't get caught up in all of the trying to explain every single word in the English language to a student.
Denise Eide:Exactly yes.
Lori:It's like you were in the session that Pam Kassner did at Plain Talk. I loved it. She said exactly that that if you can spell a word, you can read a word, but that if you can read a word, you can't necessarily spell a word. And she brought that to our attention by at the very beginning, before she said any of that, having us raise our hands if we thought we were great spellers, great readers everybody's raising their hand. And then she flashed on the screen just like OK, let's read some words Accommodate fuchsia, narcissistic Atomatopoeia. And she took them all off the screen just like OK, now let's spell those words. I was like I thought I was a great speller until that word fuchsia really knocked me out.
Denise Eide:Very good. Well, you needed one of the Latin spellings for that word. But here's something else that's interesting They've also done studies with college students and they've shown that college students who struggle with spelling are not as fluent of readers as those who have those words mastered for spelling, and that when they teach those students how to spell the words, they improve their reading fluency. Makes sense, it makes a lot of sense, but so often our idea of spelling is separated from our idea of reading. But really they're the same skills and a deeper level of mastery of the same skills.
Lori:Yeah, it was interesting with going back to that example that I gave with Atomatopoeia when Lynn Stone was on, we talked about that word and the P-O-E at the end, yeah, poem, right Like Atomatopoeia, and I was like I never even noticed that. I remember that moment in the conversation and but it's just one of those things where it took one time for somebody to point it out and now I will never forget it. I mean, it's that I don't want to say that simple because it's not simple, but it's being intentional, about drawing attention to it and then practicing it. And I already had that word. I already knew what it meant. I've used it for 41 years, so I had a leg up there.
Denise Eide:But I think what you're pointing out is how I now think about orthographic mapping bonding the spelling, the pronunciation and the meaning. You had the pronunciation and the meaning. Now you've bonded that spelling and I think, too, like I've been really realizing that again, that's our goal. Oftentimes, as educators, we want to get distracted and argue about the details, but an example from our training. So in our training, one of the things we do is we analyze frequently misspelled words and one of those words is guarantee.
Denise Eide:We use different research from Google and dictionary sites to choose these and you'll notice guarantee has a GU, two-letter guh. It's guh, guh and it's also in the word guard. So guard is spelled that way. And if you look up the etymology of these words, some of the etymology sites, guard and guarantee are related and that's why they're spelled this way. Others say no, they're not related, and at first, when I was choosing this word, I was like, oh goodness, we're gonna erupt in an argument. But I realized this we are not luxographers. It's not our job to decide historically are these words related? Instead, we are orthographic mappers. If guarding and a guarantee in that relationship helps you to remember that they both use two-letter guh, then you're golden. If it doesn't help you, that's okay, move on. But it's like onomatopoeia, right, like what helps us bond those together. That's the key.
Lori:Yeah, that's really helpful, and I think that kind of takes us into a practical example. I wanna think about decodable books and what this means for.
Denise Eide:This is gonna be my new presentation, I mean. So I'm excited we can talk about this.
Lori:Okay. So I don't even know really what question to ask, other than if we think about decodable books and we think making every book decodable. If every word is decodable, then every book should be decodable. But we do have these things called decodable books. Now we have authentic texts or trade books, whatever you like to say. So I guess what's the purpose of each and what else would you say about that? This?
Denise Eide:is fantastic. Yes, at Plain Talk our team had a great discussion about this, because you see decodable readers popping up everywhere and I had this realization that when we use the word decodable reader, we're giving a misrepresentation of what is the purpose of these books. Really, we should be calling them controlled readers because they should be fitting within the scope and sequence of a curriculum, and so we should be controlling the phonics in those books to what those students have been taught, because otherwise those words are decodable, but they're temporarily not decodable for those students because they don't know the rules yet. So we should be controlling our readers based on the scope and sequence. But I think the misinterpretation is some people now have the idea right that there's decodable books and then there's just real books and decodable books are somehow one of the steps to reading real books. But in reality it's like you said all books are decodable, Every word's decodable when we know the rules. Decodable readers should be called controlled readers and part of our scope and sequences. That's where they have meaning.
Lori:I like controlled books too.
Denise Eide:We're probably gonna change all of our language around this as well, just because of realizing this misunderstanding as we were chatting with people.
Lori:It's funny because I feel like now you've brought that to to light and it's something that I think Melissa and I have talked about in the past, like this I mean, we didn't read with decodable books and yet here we are still able to read, right, but because we had mapped the code and we Were able to read. But decodable books do have a place right, but they are with this, and I think it's it's so helpful that we're doing this for kids, it's important, but, um, I like that idea of reframing and I struggle to sometimes with alright, this is a better way to say it, but the general public still calls it that. So I'm sure you're thinking about that too, denise.
Denise Eide:This is a brand new thought from this last week Are us to change our language, and you're right to reframe that. We need controlled readers, or To lead up to being able to read anything to help Practice the skills that we're learning. And so, yeah, I think it's gonna be a challenge to reframe our language as well, and we and it's not just children who need it adults who are learning to read or high school students who are learning to read Need to be given texts that are controlled for the phonetic concepts that they've been taught, so that they build their fluency and their confidence. And then I'm not a fan of leveled readers, because once students have enough of the code, they're gonna be able to read at the same level they can listen and comprehend. We should let them go explore that world and, yes, to keep building their levels, but we shouldn't ever be like, ah, you can't read that yet.
Lori:If they want to and they're capable of it, we agree with that, we totally do I can't tell you how many, year after year, I kept sending Emails to my daughter's school. Please, no leveled readers for her. Just let her read whatever she would like to read, cuz she can read.
Denise Eide:Instead, like a program that has a scope in sequence and a student who's not reading yet, you could take other decodable readers and go. What phonetic concepts are in here and where does it fit in the scope and sequence as a Controlled reader? That's, I think, where they belong and once the students, like I, can read anything, go for it. That's the goal. We've opened the world of books to you.
Melissa:I'm wondering about you're thinking of teachers right now in their classrooms, and many who have a curriculum that they have to teach, especially for foundational skills what? What are some practical ways you think teachers might be able to apply what we've talked about today If, for instance, their curriculum does not necessarily get into everything that we all the rules that we talked about?
Denise Eide:Yeah, well, hopefully, what we've sparked is a little curiosity, curiosity. So one of the things I say to teachers if, if you can just change the habit of saying that's an exception when a student asks a question about words, we would never do that with science, right? We'd never be like, well, I don't know, but that is an exception to the laws of physics. No, we'd go, I don't know. So if you are listening today, I think just one takeaway is to, when a kid asks a question, or as soon as a question about a word, just say I don't know and Then go ahead and look it up.
Denise Eide:On the logic of English website there's a free resources section. We publish all the spelling rules for free. We have a chart of all the phonograms and their sounds. You can listen to them. And then another step you can take is, for example, if your program is teaching, the letter C says C, go look at our website, find out if it says a second or a third sound and Incorporate all the sounds right there in your scope and sequence.
Denise Eide:Or if you're teaching silenese, go ahead and look at the spelling rules, discover that there's nine and Teach a few more of them at least, because you're going to discover they're very, very helpful and they explain tons of thousands of words, and so, using that scope and sequence you have as the base, but just doing your best to fill in some of the holes, and Usually people find that that's sparking their own curiosity about the language. The other thing I'd say is be okay with your students that you don't really know the answers and that you're looking it up and learning it with them. Students love when we learn alongside of them. That's, it's okay. This is a huge cultural misunderstanding about language and I think the way that we get out of the literacy crisis is we all learn more about English together.
Lori:Yeah, it also de-shames for our students who are maybe not wanting to ask a question, embarrassed to ask a question, learning the language, maybe at a different pace than others. So I think it does bring that. It normalizes the learning experience. Yeah, is there anything we should think about when we're working with students who might learn differently, like such as they might have dyslexia, or maybe our English learners?
Denise Eide:Yeah, I think students can vary in the amount of practice they need and so we often get questions like is learning at a awe for the letter a too hard for kids or too hard for students with disabilities? And what I like to talk to people about is this first of all, young students don't realize that the lane. If we tell them that this is at a all right from the beginning, then they have that information. So like I like to introduce it to young students by saying something like this how many sounds does a cat make? And they can meow and hiss and you know imitate. Or how many sounds does a dog make? Dogs make lots of sounds, one. The same way, in English, some of our phonograms make more than one sound. So just normalizing them to that idea and then Introducing them all from the beginning because if you think about ball water, coal, fall, want, I mean that awe sound is Frequent, it's an, I think over two thousand words, it's in high frequency words.
Denise Eide:So really stepping back as an adult, realizing unlearning is hard. So we are unlearning some ideas that we were taught, but Learning it from the beginning, that opens up the world of language and then practicing, that's the thing some students are gonna need a little bit of practice. Some are gonna need a lot of practice, but make the practice fun. You know, lay the phonograms out on the floor with young kids and jump from phonogram to phonogram saying the sounds, do scavenger hunts. You know, play card games. But it internalized that information by playing games and making it fun and once you have that, you have that for life. It really is the information you need to spell a word and to actually use spellchecker efficiently. So, that said, I don't think with disabilities. Even IDA says this is the information. Structured literacy, right, but the amount of practice that's on us with the art of teaching to make that enjoyable and fun.
Lori:Can you say more about the use of spellchecker? Because I'm just envisioning meet myself trying to spell the word simultaneously and Not remembering there's a you or there should be a you, and then it's a whole different word, and I just imagine that'd be very confusing, especially if I were someone learning English or a Frustrated and trying to write something. You know, I just think it. It takes it to a level of frustration really quickly.
Denise Eide:Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I think one of the things I've discovered is pretty much everyone who Reads and writes in English has had a moment where you can't get spellchecker to recognize the word you want, and it's frustrating.
Denise Eide:And I didn't kind of I thought this was, by the way, I thought this was just me until I started speaking in rooms of hundreds of people and one day I got really brave and asked how many people have had this experience and everybody raises their hands and I'm like, oh, oh, this is a universal English problem. But I don't have that problem anymore because I know the phonograms and so it's a combination of segmenting words or phonemic awareness skills, being able to segment words and then also knowing oh, that's the other spelling of off, nope, not that one, no, that, oh, got it and we're good. But if we don't know how to do those basic segmenting skills, we don't know the options for our spelling, or most of them. We're in a struggle with spelling, especially multi-syllabic words. But this information and again I think that's the misnomer right phonics is for decodable readers like Matt Sat, really Accurate. Phonics is for the whole language, every word in English.
Melissa:I love that story you told of your presentation about the man that Didn't know how to read and watch one of your presentations and then called you up To talk about it. I was like I just wish someone would have told me this for all from the beginning.
Denise Eide:I've had that experience over and over and over and over with people who struggle with reading and I had someone who had his master's degree and had accommodations and sat in on a similar presentation and came up to me afterwards and he was like, denise, what you were saying I could actually start to understand some of the words on the screen in just that hour. Imagine the pain right of trying to figure out how do I navigate education in life without literacy, thinking there's something wrong with me. But really we were taught a very incomplete code into guess.
Lori:Is this a good time to bring up the exception? What is exception?
Denise Eide:Sure, I think I referenced that earlier that what I'm really defining now, since English is morphophonemic, it's a balance of sound and meaning. By the way, every spelling system is. This is not unique to English. I think what's unique to English speakers is we all think our language is unique and extra hard or extra special or something, but really it's this balance of sound and meaning. You get a number I gave the example of two with the silent w and it's in twin. There's two of them twice. You do it two times. You start to see these relationships in meaning that either explain the spelling that's an exception or give you more insight into the words. All of these help us to orthographically map the words. I'm starting to think that there's sure exceptions to the phonics rules, but that doesn't make them exceptions to the actual written structure of English, which is balancing sound and meaning. Then, when we have that bigger picture, we're able to just understand how English works. That's the goal, right.
Lori:Yeah, I want to make sure we hit that home right at the end here. Denise, is there anything you would like to share with our listeners that you haven't shared yet?
Denise Eide:No, that's about it, although we do have a lot of free resources on our website. If you're curious, check it out, logicofenglishcom, and there's even some free activities there to help you with instruction some word lists, some practice activities. We just hope it makes a difference in people's lives and that we can shift culture together, shift the culture of how we understand our language. I think this will truly make a difference in literacy levels in our nation.
Melissa:We've already mentioned your book several times, but just in case, if you got to this point, it's uncovering. The logic of English is Denise's book. Then also, you have an in-person training coming up. Do you want to share about that too?
Denise Eide:We do. We have an in-person teacher training in Rochester, minnesota, june 25th through the 28th. We offer this once a year. It's a four-day workshop, I think last year. One of the things that gave me so much delight is someone from one of the departments of education came up to me at the break and she said to me she said, denise, I just called my daughter and I told her I now know how to teach any word in English. I was like you could ask me and I could teach you how to spell or read that word. I love that. That made me so happy. I've been thinking about that ever since, hopefully. But we go through how English works. We integrate that information with the science of reading, the major studies, helping to understand how these all connect together the five strands of reading.
Lori:All right, we'll link it all on the show notes, and literacypodcastcom is where you can find Show notes. You can find it where you listen to podcasts. Just scroll down and click on those notes on your phone. We are happy to share this information with you and thank you so much, denise, for being here with us.
Denise Eide:Melissa and Lori. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure, Thank you.
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