Danielle Colenbrander and Katie Pace-Miles discuss orthographic mapping, irregular word instruction, and the different terms used to describe high frequency and irregular words. They translate research about the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching irregular words. They also discuss the role of morphology - how understanding morphemes can help students decode and understand words.
Takeaways
Resources
Our guests mentioned the work of Lyndall Murray but meant Bruce Murray. The correct article is linked above.
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.
Danielle Colenbrander and Katie Pace-Miles discuss orthographic mapping, irregular word instruction, and the different terms used to describe high frequency and irregular words. They translate research about the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching irregular words. They also discuss the role of morphology - how understanding morphemes can help students decode and understand words.
Takeaways
Resources
Our guests mentioned the work of Lyndall Murray but meant Bruce Murray. The correct article is linked above.
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're listening to Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy. We are all familiar with the practice of having our youngest students memorize the spelling of hundreds of words because they don't follow the rules that we're teaching. But there must be a better way. Today you will hear from researchers Danielle Collen-Brander and Katie Pace-Miles about what research says about the best ways to teach irregular words to your students.
Lori:Hi teacher friends. I'm Laurie and I'm Melissa. We are two educators who want the best for all kids, and we know you do too.
Melissa:We worked 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:Laurie, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.
Lori:Hi everyone. Welcome to Melissa and Laurie Love Literacy. Today we can't wait to talk about a regular word instruction, which we may even throw away the term irregular by the time we're done with this conversation. Who knows? But we're also going to be talking about sight words and even discuss how morphology relates to reading and spelling instruction, and we have two amazing guests to help us have this important conversation.
Melissa:Yeah, we are so excited for our two guests. Today we have Danielle Collen-Brander she's a lecturer and researcher at the Australian Center for the Advancement of Literacy at Australian Catholic University, and Katie Pace-Miles, who's an associate professor at Brooklyn College, the University of New York. And, fun fact, they've written a paper together and they've never met until now. So yay, two papers together. Welcome to the podcast, danielle and Katie, thank you. Thanks for having us. Excellent. So we're going to start out with a question to you, katie. The reason being is we wanted to ask you about orthographic mapping. It's a term that everyone's talking about right now, sometimes used correctly, sometimes not. We want to clarify that, and we know that you worked with Linnea Airee, and so you know all about orthographic mapping. So we're going to turn it over to you to start there for our discussion about a regular word instruction.
Katie Pace Miles:Well, thanks so much. I did have the great pleasure of working, the immense honor I should say, of working with Dr Airee, and I will say she's the one that knows everything. I haven't had an original thought. None of this is an original thought. I always go back to some of Linnea's writings about orthographic mapping, so I do want to say what I'm about to say really comes from her work.
Katie Pace Miles:This is Airee's theory of orthographic mapping. It's the most substantiated theory of how words are stored in memory and it's based on decades of research. So orthographic mapping refers to the connection forming process between letters and spellings of words and if you are watching this, I'm holding my hand up that spellings are up here. It's the connection between those letters and the spelling, with the pronunciation that those letters make, and this is applied, this bond, this glue, as Airee would refer to it. It's applied when words are red and when they're spelled. So this connection forming process secures spellings to their pronunciations as well as and this part is often in Airee's diagrams the connection between the spelling and the pronunciation is in red, and then the connection with the meaning is in gray, because the meaning is there, the meaning is necessary, whether it's a syntactical use or semantic use, but it is between the spelling and pronunciation that is the most prominent link, the most prominent connection there.
Katie Pace Miles:So this process of securing the spellings, the pronunciations and adding that meaning, this is what enables students to read words by sight, and I'm always hesitant to use the word sight, but Airee very confidently says that it's how we read words by sight. That's not to be confused with what happens in classrooms around sight word reading. But, as Airee so eloquently explains, every word goes through this connection, or this bonding of the spelling to the pronunciation and using or understanding the meaning of the word. And that's how we have these accurate representations of words in memory and these clear, accurate representations, and then we're able to retrieve these representations of words and also, to use a term that Airee often uses, it's an amalgam that's formed between the spelling, the pronunciation and the meaning.
Danielle Colenbrander:One thing I want to mention is and thank you, Katie, for that wonderful description of orthographic mapping. But one thing that I heard someone say recently, which I thought was maybe a little bit of a misconception about orthographic mapping, is I heard someone say adults don't, or good readers don't, memorize words. And that's really tricky because actually they do, but it's how they get there, that's the important thing. So orthographic mapping is that process of bonding the spelling and the sounds together and that is one way of getting those words into your memory in a precise and detailed way that you can later look at a word and just automatically retrieve its sound and its meaning. But they have to be in your memory and really good readers. They don't have to effortfully decode every single word. They can automatically access them. And when they can do that, that is what we would call a sight word, or I guess, what Linnae Airee would call a sight word. Is that right, Katie? Would you agree? Perfect?
Katie Pace Miles:yes. I was wondering if you got some of the definition. Danielle, that was great.
Danielle Colenbrander:I didn't know I was going to do that, but it happened, so that's great and meaning plays an important part in that too.
Lori:Right, they have to be in your lexicon somewhere. I'll give an example. My daughter is at 12 and she was reading a book and out loud to me the other day and the word senile came up and she was saying senile, senile. And you could see her just stumbling over and never heard that before, didn't know what it meant, had zero context. I'm sure as teachers we hear this all the time, happen in classrooms. But that meaning piece is so important because we either have I think, have to have heard the word before or have some sort of sense of what it might mean in order to make some sense of it going forward.
Danielle Colenbrander:Yes, and that's another term which I will introduce a little bit later. I won't go into it now because I'm going to blow everyone's minds, but I think at this point we probably should talk about what is meant by a regular word, because that's very central to this whole piece. And so what I was kind of saying before when we were talking, before we were recording, is that it's not really a category that a word is either regular or irregular. It's more of a spectrum. So on one end of the spectrum you have words like cat, cat to completely regular relationship between the letters and the sounds in the words and kind of the letters and their most frequent or predictable pronunciations. But then you have other words like aisle, a-i-s-l-e or morang, where there are quite a few letters that don't match up to their most predictable or their most frequent pronunciation. And then there are words in between, like yang for example, where if you were to decode it using your knowledge of the most frequent letter sound relationships or graphene phoneme relationships, you might say yang. So we have that spectrum of words and it's really difficult because when you have these two different terms it makes it sound like there's nothing in common with these words that you can't treat them the same way, or even that you couldn't decode an irregular word. But you can, because there are always some graph I'm going to use the term graph in phoneme in correspondences. It's the same as like letter sound correspondences or letter sound relationships.
Danielle Colenbrander:You can, because there's always something in there that is regular or something that some way that you can get to a pronunciation. So with the word young, for example, if you decode it and you say young, well what's another word that sounds similar to that? It's young. If that's in your spoken vocabulary, you can then retrieve that meaning and the correct spoken form of the word. And maybe you might just do that with single words. But also you might be reading a book and you might have decoded the word and then looked at what's around the word and gone oh, a baby. A baby is young. A baby is young. And that is a process that we call set for variability or mispronunciation correction, and you can do that with regular words or irregular words. It's just with irregular words the decoded pronunciation is going to be a little more distant from the actual pronunciation of the word. So I've introduced a few terms.
Melissa:I'm guessing. I just wanted to throw in because I always think of flashcards here. This is always what comes into my mind is, in kindergarten, we give our kids however many flashcards of what we used to call sight words, and kids are just memorizing them. And when you mentioned that dichotomy, danielle, of they're either regular and you can decode them or they're irregular, I feel like what happened with all of those irregular words, no matter where they fell on the spectrum, they all became flashcards and we just have to memorize them.
Danielle Colenbrander:There might be some situations where you really just want kids to have those words in their written and spoken vocabularies as quickly as possible so that they can access more texts. So maybe in the decodable text, mostly they decode most of the words, but there's a few words we'll call them irregular words for now, since we don't have a better term that they aren't going to be able to decode, and so in those cases, sometimes a certain degree of, dare I say it, flashcard Automat Automaticity.
Lori:Is that what you're getting at Automaticity?
Danielle Colenbrander:Yeah, it's okay for a very small number of highly frequent and very irregular words. That's definitely not the way that you would approach learning to read as a whole. It's kind of one little tool in your toolbox. But if you do that all the time and you don't teach children how to decode, then they don't have that tool for building those very detailed and precise orthographic representations in their memory and they can't. They don't have a good tool to tackle words that they've never seen before. So I think you can use that a little bit and there is evidence that it can work. But if you do it for a lot of words it's inefficient and it takes away the opportunity to learn.
Lori:Kind of a code-breaking technique that you can apply to other words Okay, so I'm thinking I'm a teacher, listening, and I'm a kindergarten teacher and I have taught my students you know, I don't know I've taught my students according to our phonics scope and sequence, what's happening in that scope and sequence. But I would like to have them use some decodable books to practice what they're learning in that scope and sequence. And in order to do that, they need to learn a little bit more, just a couple words, to be able to decode in these books, I'm thinking, the word the right, so that they can read. And then that might be an example where that's not a bad thing. We're not ruining them forever by having them remember this word, the. But in the long run, it's not efficient or effective to have them do that.
Danielle Colenbrander:Okay, and you can build in the decoding later if they learn, you know, if it's a word that they haven't learned all the graphinphonium correspondences for yet, but they will later you can build that back into the word later on and you can even talk about the sounds that the different words make. Sometimes it's appropriate. But with a word like the, if you really just want to get them reading it quickly, you know, just looking at it, memorizing it, it's okay for the short term, for a few words, and there's no research to suggest that if you do that with a few words they're going to unlearn their phonics, which is something people worry about. And I guess if, maybe if you were to do that with lots of words, it would happen. But if you're just doing it with a really small subset of words, alongside that good phonics instruction, the risk is not as dramatic as you might think.
Katie Pace Miles:Daniel, I'm really glad you pointed out those few words and alongside, I just want to really emphasize those two points the alongside, the strong phonics instruction really, really matters. As Daniel knows, I ran a study with kindergartners Laura, you were asking about kindergartners and one of the things that we were. We had a group of 80 students. Half of the students were native English speakers, the other half were multilingual learners. We did all of these analyses. We were looking at whether we flash carded words. We looked at whether they could read the words, whether they could spell the words, whether they could use the words in sentences, and a couple of different findings came out.
Katie Pace Miles:And I won't get into all of that in the depths of that study, but I will say when we went back and we did this reanalysis, we looked at students who would have been categorized as partial versus full alphabetic readers.
Katie Pace Miles:So it also mattered where the students were in their own development at that time and the partial alphabetic readers had a much more difficult time getting up and going with the flash carded words than the full alphabetic readers Because the full alphabetic readers had some anchoring ability. They had some graphy phoneme connection knowledge that they could land those flash carded words onto at Seen Bike. And so there's this other thing with Daniela saying like a limited number of words alongside your phonics instruction. This was a concerning finding for me. At the time I was like my gosh, if this is number one all, if this was like the majority of what they were getting in the school day, this would be extremely problematic. And two, the time would be better used possibly doing word analysis or grapho-phenetic knowledge, correspondence learning in general, so that they could use those skills and apply them to more words.
Danielle Colenbrander:And I will also say that in some of my own research we've also compared basic kind of flash card, just look and say, to mispronunciation correction type instruction where they decode the word using their knowledge of graphene-phenene correspondences and then they think about what word it sounds like that is in their spoken vocabulary. And we also compared it to actually writing the words and we found that both the mispronunciation correction and the writing words were more effective for learning the words than just looking and saying. So they did learn some words with look and say but they learned more words in the other conditions. So that processing of the actual letters, the actual graphemes within the words is so important, as we've been saying from the beginning, and it really helps those words to stick better in memory and to bind the sounds to the spellings.
Melissa:Yeah, this is great, and I think I mean you've already kind of jumped to our next question, but we're going to. I'm still going to ask it and open it up in case there's more that you want to add to it, because what we wanted to ask was so what does research actually say about how to teach these irregular words, when it's not just a simple cat? Everything just goes with the sounds that we expect those letters to make. You already gave some really great tips here, but if you have more to share about what the research says, we would love to hear it.
Katie Pace Miles:Daniel, your study is one of my favorites, so I'm so glad to hear that it's really it's been such an awesome relationship with Daniel because I've been I was over here, like in New York, running some studies and Daniel and I connected on some work that kind of falls in the middle, right and then Danielle, I got, I was distracted doing something else and then Danielle comes out with two incredible articles, one in 2020, right, daniel and another in 2022. And it was. I was like, oh man, this is exactly what the field needed. Oh, thank you so much. It's just fantastic. So, daniel, maybe I'll just mention one or two more things and then really, you should talk even more about that meta analysis you did and the mispronunciation approach that was in your 2022 study.
Katie Pace Miles:I just wanted to highlight, like, some more things about the research from a study that I had run I think it was back in 2018. I mentioned that first finding. I want to highlight one other finding about content versus function. Words, which are we didn't really get into that with you were dabbling like what's a site word and high frequency words. In some of my work on high frequency words, I've also started looking more at the types of words that are on these lists and one of the things to note is the abundance of words that are called function words which, for the sake of our time here, are just words that are not nouns, that are very difficult to anchor in meaning and that overwhelmingly you need to use syntax to figure out. You know, like the word then and what you know, how have you been? The word was, the word have and things like that. So, long story short, what I found in some of my research was that these function words were more difficult for both native English speakers and multilingual learners to learn, and that was to read, to spell and to use in sentences.
Katie Pace Miles:But there were two findings I think was. One was around sequential decoders versus hierarchical decoders when they're reading high frequency words, and the sequential decoders were decoding letter by letter. The hierarchical decoders were at the point of identifying the vowel units in the words or the more complex graphofonetic elements in the words. And when they were reading these high frequency words, it was the students who were the hierarchical decoders, those students who didn't just start at the beginning of the word and go straight through and try and figure out to read it, but the students who could do some analysis while they were decoding, or maybe their eyes were going ahead and glancing at those words and saying, all right, there's an OA coming up here, get ready for this one. Right, I know what to do here. So that was another interesting finding, that those hierarchical decoders were doing better with their high frequency or irregular word reading. And then I think it was Murray again, but Danielle, you'll have to correct me.
Katie Pace Miles:It was the analysis where they trained some students to read the words and sentences and other students they were giving them. I always think of it as like a scalpel. I presented at the reading league, but they were giving the students tools like popsicle sticks and then they used a pen to highlight parts of the words that may be and I also don't like to say irregular at times too, because irregular is all based on what phonetic knowledge? Who's got the phonetic knowledge? The teacher's phonetic knowledge, students. But it was a part of the word like it. Let's say in the word laugh. The students may get to that GH and they might be like okay, wait a second, pull out those tools and let's box that part of the word, because that's new to me. I don't know what's going on there, but it was through using tools in that analysis that students were performing better in reading these.
Katie Pace Miles:I guess it were irregular high frequency words, and so then I want to hand it to Danielle, because those studies came before Danielle's work and for me, just as someone who tries to run research and then translate research, it really started elucidating this opportunity to support teachers and developing more rigorous word analysis activities to use in whatever aspect of their literacy moment they find themselves in when they come upon a word, and it's like this isn't going to be written into some overstuffed curriculum. These just have to be quick things. As teachers, we're pulling over like, all right, let's do X, y or Z to do some word analysis Right now. It's going to take us one minute. Okay, I want it. Then, danielle, it's hands in, yeah.
Danielle Colenbrander:Okay. So I'm not sure I can follow up on all those details, but one thing that I want to pick out of that is this idea of kind of slightly different approaches to slightly different words, because I think I used the word toolbox before and that's what we need for English, because English isn't a completely transparent orthography, as we say in the business. It's not completely regular. There are words that are less predictable in their spelling and also in English spelling is also influenced by the morphological structure of words the sound parts sorry, not the sound parts, the parts of words. So, for example, in unpacking, that word has got three morphemes in it un pack and in I'll go into that a bit more later. But because we have this complex orthography with words that have different levels of regularity, having only one approach is just not gonna be enough to hit all the points that we wanna hit. And we want to give students enough tools that when they come across words that they haven't seen before, they have a few different ways of getting at the word, breaking down longer words and getting themselves enough information that they can then recognize that word and they spoke in vocabulary, go oh yeah, that's that word, and then continue with their reading and in that process they are building up, they're doing orthographic mapping, they're building up their vocabulary of written and spoken words and getting to a point where they have a large, large number of words that are in their memory, automatically accessible, making reading fluent and easy. So that's the end goal. But to get there we need a whole bunch of different tools. So one of the things in the toolbox which I'll talk about is this idea of mispronunciation correction and that is the idea that you use these, your knowledge of graphing voting correspondences, to decode a word. You get to what's called a spelling pronunciation. So think about the word Wednesday when I spell that word, I still say Wednesday in my head, and I think a lot of people do that, and that's a spelling pronunciation. And what you've done there is you've done some kind of mispronunciation correction process, you've sounded it out, you've got Wednesday oh, that's gotta be Wednesday and you still actually have that spelling pronunciation in your memory and you use that when you write the word to help you spell the word. So there's kind of the reading side of it getting to the pronunciation, and there's also the spelling side of it, storing that spelling pronunciation which helps you remember which graphemes go where and which can help you with the spelling. So there are a few small studies that have looked at mispronunciation correction, either on its own or in conjunction with other things as part of like a big training program. There's only really a handful of them maybe I think four or five studies but together they do suggest that that is an effective way of doing things and it's more effective than just getting kids to look at the words and say them and just memorize them that way. So that's one thing you can do. Now.
Danielle Colenbrander:You mentioned heart words before, and that's a tricky one, and I think that's one that I'm hearing more and more about, and I had the same experience of hearing this thing heart words and seeing people say, oh, this is evidence-based, you know, this is science-based. And I was like, oh well, I've really missed something, because I've never come across this before. And then I thought, oh gosh, you know what have I missed? So I started looking for research on heart words and my PhD student, anna Lithgow, she's started looking for research on heart words and we didn't find anything. So we didn't find any studies that take heart word instruction and actively compare it to a different type of instruction for teaching people to read or spell irregular words. We just didn't find any studies like that. Maybe they're out there and we missed them, and if they are, please let me know. I'd love to see them, but we haven't found them. And then we were sort of like so what's happened here? And I think what's happened is people are using evidence-based and science-based in a different way to how I would use it. So what they're really talking about is they're talking about theory-based Because heart words.
Danielle Colenbrander:So let me explain what that is, just so everyone is on the same page and anyone can correct me if they have a different impression of what it means Is that, say, you're sounding out the word young, and that was the example I used before. So if you were doing this pronunciation correction, you would use kind of the most frequent or regular graphing phone in correspondence. So you'd go yeah, yeah, but if you were doing heart words, you might say let's sound out this word together and then you might actually explicitly say this part is the tricky part or whatever word you wanna say, and you would say yeah, ah, mm. And then that OU, you'd be actually saying the irregular pronunciation of that sound and then the kids would still be breaking the word down, but instead of using the most frequent pronunciation, they'd be using the one we use when we say the word, which is the irregular pronunciation. And so actually there's a lot of reasons to believe that it would work, because it does kind of match up to the theory of orthographic mapping, that you're breaking a word down and you're learning the connections between the spellings and the sounds, or the graphemes and the phonemes.
Danielle Colenbrander:The thing is it just hasn't been tested yet. So maybe it works, but we don't know. It's not evidence-based, it's theory-based. And I think that's a really, really, really important distinction, because people often do say something is evidence-based and what they mean is it's based on a really solid theory of how children learn to read, that that has lots of evidence behind it. And if we don't have any studies comparing one form of teaching to another form of teaching, then that's a great way to make a decision. But in some cases we do have, and at the moment what we have is a little bit of evidence from his pronunciation correction, and that is, we know that it's better than look and say we don't know, that it's better than writing the word so far, but we don't actually know, with heart words, whether it's better than anything else.
Melissa:That's really helpful.
Danielle Colenbrander:And my suspicion is it's probably just as effective as mispronunciation correction. That's my guess, but I don't know what the consequences are for spelling and for the number of graphene phonemes, correspondences that you learn, and that has consequences for the efficiency of your instructional time. So this is an open question. So if you want like a practical response, what should I do? Well, I think if you're using heart words and you feel like it's working for you at the moment, that's probably okay, but just bear in mind that there may be something better out there and have a look into maybe some other methods. And then mispronunciation correction is one thing that you can look at, and I'm being very cautious because, like I said, it's not that we have evidence it doesn't work. I'm not saying that at all. It does match up to a really solid theory of how children learn to read. So it's quite likely that it will work, but we don't know because no one has actually tested it and compared it to a different training.
Lori:Okay, and I think just to kind of like do a quick pause and recap, because that was a ton of information you both just shared.
Danielle Colenbrander:Yes, sorry.
Lori:And I just want to clarify too, when you're saying mispronunciation correction, I think we've heard that on the podcast before and maybe in research that we've read as set for variability. Those are the same Correct.
Danielle Colenbrander:Yes, they are the same thing.
Lori:Okay. So just to kind of like pin that for our stamp, that for our listeners and I mean I just kind of keep thinking too to what we talked about in the very beginning of our conversation there aren't if we know that there aren't any quote or regular words, there's just less frequent, maybe less regular.
Danielle Colenbrander:Less frequent, I would say frequency and regularity are different things. So frequency is about how often you come across a word, how often it appears in either written or spoken language, and regularity is how reliable and predictable the relationship is between the letters and the sounds.
Lori:Okay. So then I'm going to stick with less regular than that's the way, okay.
Melissa:Yes, can I just jump into? I think, katie, I think I saw you at the reading league when you talked a lot about temporary like, just even using the language just like. So you're not telling students, oh, this is just a regular, it's crazy, you know you'll never see it again, but instead just saying like, for now it's temporarily irregular for us because we haven't learned it yet and I just loved that language difference, right? So then you're not saying what Lori is saying of just like. Well, this is they're all irregular. And making kids feel like, oh my gosh, like there's so many irregular words. Well, listen.
Katie Pace Miles:that's so right and I work with a lot of young students. Kindergarten, first grade, pre-k to second is really my wheelhouse and it also goes in the other direction where I didn't find it to be of benefit for that kindergartner to have to learn every rule in that moment in order to make it regular.
Lori:That's helpful. Yeah, good point, good point.
Katie Pace Miles:We always see of it as in what you said, but also there's a cognitive load here. But it's really that the teacher has to hold all of the knowledge, I think around the regularity of English, the structure of English. Denise Idez is a colleague of mine and is the most brilliant mind, I think, on this and I think she would agree. It's like the teacher that's holding this knowledge and then executing on it. It used synchronically with the child, like each child, and this is very difficult to do, I understand, in classrooms. But the child in front of you is coming with a progression of grapho-fanatic knowledge and in that moment on Tuesday or Wednesday has learned this many concepts and is ready maybe for one more. When they reach a word that may be temporarily irregularly spelled for them, maybe they can handle that new unit in that moment, and maybe another kiddo isn't there yet, and so it's really an incredible task that the teacher is up for in this moment, when you really start digesting the complexity of what needs to happen around just word reading in general. And Denise would say we just did this analysis in the paper that's under review. So we use the 70 grapho-fanatic connections that she teaches in her program, along with the 13 spelling rules that she teaches and what we always say is you could use any set of a phonics scope and sequence, whatever scope and sequence you have, that your school is saying you have to use, take that. And then you look at your high frequency word list and that's how you should be able to figure out which of these words at this moment, at this grade level, would be regularly spelled for the students, temporarily irregularly spelled and then there are going to be some permanently irregularly spelled words.
Katie Pace Miles:What Denise and Janaye Butler together. We looked at the 220 or so words from the dolce list and, using that set of grapho-fanatic connections and the 13 spelling rules, denise was able to figure out oh, it's only 1% of the words that are actually exception words. That's what I think she would prefer that term exception words, not irregular words, and that's incredible, right? That also means that the teacher needs to hold a lot of grapho-fanatic knowledge and a lot of spelling rule knowledge. That's not at all impossible right.
Lori:It also really debunks the idea that there are just words that are like permanently I don't wanna say again irregular, but permanently Like. I just feel like that is not the case and I think, as teachers, I love thinking about okay, what do my students know based on what I've taught them, based on what they've learned in previous grades as per scope and sequences, and then what do I know about these irregular words, words that are less irregular, stumbling all over the place here, and what they need moving forward, and then how can I give that to them? Right, and maybe they're using some of the strategies. Oh, it's like this is a temporary, this is temporary, we're gonna learn this temporarily until we get to the spring, and then we really hone that knowledge in and we stamp that there. Or maybe it's because we're reading a decodable book and they need that word right then. So I think there's lots of different purposes to use a lot of the strategies that you shared today.
Danielle Colenbrander:And one thing I just wanna bring up is that also, you don't have to teach the students every single graph infonium correspondence in English. You don't have to do that because that would take forever. There's like more than 400 of them. There's no way. So you don't need to do that. What you need to do is you need to have your scope and sequence and your set of graph infonium correspondences. As Katie was saying that you're gonna teach and teach those. Well, but then at some point the students have to go off on their own and read and build their own site vocabularies, and no teacher can do that for anyone. They have to do that themselves. So what you are doing is giving them the tools to be able to go off and do that. And so I mean, I sometimes see people getting super anxious about like, oh, my gosh, you know this graph infonium correspondence is irregular or they haven't seen this one before. But they don't have to see everything. They just need enough to get close enough to that pronunciation. No, have the word in this vocabularie and then go oh, make that connection between the spelling and the sound and probably the meaning as well, and then see that word again. Make the connection again. Get faster and faster and faster and then suddenly it's automatic.
Danielle Colenbrander:So it's always this tricky balance of you know how many. I think that's the hard question how many and for how long? And we don't have really good answers to that question from research at this stage. But the point is that you don't have to keep doing it forever and ever and ever and ever. And also at some point the kids, the type of words that the kids are seeing, changes. So it goes from being mostly monosyllabic, monomorphemic words with kind of quite simple words and two longer words, more complex words, and that's when you go okay, well, now is a good time to think more about morphology and about breaking words down more philologically, because those are the kinds of words that students are gonna see. So this is another tool, this is a new way to unlock those words and get to the pronunciations and also the meanings of those words.
Katie Pace Miles:I just wanna highlight what Danielle's talking about. So key it's these terms that we don't have time to really get into it. Danielle had mentioned set for variability kicks in David shares self-teaching hypothesis comes into play, Is it right? So maybe you've heard of statistical learning, right? All of these things, right, Danielle? Like this is, these terms have been floating around while Danielle was talking. That's exactly right. Those two, they are part of what allows your reading to take off, as teachers were always like oh, suddenly it just took off, and that's what Danielle's talking about.
Melissa:Can I ask you to a question about the set for variability or mispronunciation correction, I don't know. Do you remember, lori, that you were in a presentation about set for variability at one point and a lot of people ask the question how is it different from three queuing? Because you know the way you just explained it. Danielle is like you know, you kind of look at the context around the word as you're reading it to make that like I was, it was, it was cute.
Danielle Colenbrander:Stop being there, because I've had this question before. And the key difference, the absolutely crucial thing, is you start with decoding the word. You don't ignore the letters in the word and go to the context. The context is secondary, it's an additional thing if you need it, but that's not where you start. You start with decoding the word, so it is not three queuing at all. You have to start by sounding out the word and trying to get pronunciation from the letters.
Lori:Okay, so let's take. Can we do an example with senile, since I gave that earlier? Okay, so let's just run it through. My daughter couldn't say senile. I didn't say look, here's a picture of senile. Let's look at a picture, right, like what? This is the word.
Lori:I wrote the letters on a big piece of paper and she was thinking it said se, because se says see, and that was in her memory, her lexicon for see. And I was like what other sounds does e make E? Okay, let's say that again now. E-n-i o.
Lori:Right, oh, I noticed that the e doesn't say anything on the end. That's not new to you, you're 12. And I was like okay, let's go back to the book we're reading. Let's read this sentence again. Let's make sense of this now in the context of the story that you're reading. And I had been reading it with her so I could talk to her about it, and we made sense of it. But we didn't just go right for a picture of it, or even just let's figure this out in the context of it. We looked right at the word, we looked at the word, we looked at the word and then we used all of the other things that we know are also so helpful to secure that long-term memory for that one. Yes, that's right, and I mean what you did there was saying does the letter e say any other? Sounds that?
Danielle Colenbrander:is your sit for variability, your knowledge of the different sounds that that vowel letter can be associated with Right, and the reason why I did that is because I listened to the letter e.
Lori:and I listened to the letter e and the reason I did that is because I listened to her first go at it and that was the letter and the emphasis that she was getting wrong. So she was trying to emphasize the other Nile in a weird way and also saying e. So I went for that as my set for because I knew that was the part that she was struggling with. So I think that tells us a lot about our students, right?
Melissa:And I think that's a good thing to do too. With that example, lori, like if she had heard the term C Nile before, right, if she, if that was a word in her oral language vocabulary, she might have been able to do that on her own.
Lori:That's right. Much faster than me and probably much less annoying than having her mom, walk her through that.
Danielle Colenbrander:But there you see the importance of vocabulary.
Katie Pace Miles:I'm sorry, katie, you wanted to say something I'm going to give and jump back in here because I'll just throw out the word a first grader reading mitten. This is an example I often give when I give talks mitten, right, I'm from Buffalo, I live in Brooklyn, new York. Everyone in my orbit knows what a mitten is right, but I've worked with students who maybe are new to New York and they don't know mitten, and so I. This was an example I witnessed where the student was saying mit 10, mit 10. It's awesome because they had learned such great CVC word, announced they had such awesome CVC word skills mit 10. I couldn't have asked for more. And then I was.
Katie Pace Miles:I was like how exactly am I going to say well, this was actually pronounced. You know, mitten, I'm going to ruin their CVC In the moment. I paused and really was like you know, daniel, what we were just saying was separate variability happening with David share self teaching, because they had heard the word mitten before, right? This student was like wait a second, I know that there is a thing called a mitten and I'm going to try it here. And they tried it. So they reached into their vocabulary and that's what's been some interesting work in research around how vocabulary really does support your decoding skills. Right through this separate variability, these opportunities to execute on separate yeah.
Katie Pace Miles:Yeah.
Danielle Colenbrander:And I think that there's a natural you know this panic about, is it three queuing? It's a natural thing when you swing from one perspective to another. So initially it was like, oh you know, decoding is a last resort. And then now we're like decoding is the first thing you should do. So then all context is terrible. No, you've got all these tools at your disposal, use them all, but you do need to start with the decoding and the graph, infonium correspondences, because that is kind of the tool that you're going to use, the tool that in the beginning, I guess, gives you the most bang for your buck. It opens up the most words, especially for beginning readers who read a lot more regular words and monosyllabic words. And then you build on the other stuff onto that and the vocabulary piece. That also should go all the way through, because it's not just about reading, of course, it's about understanding as well. So they kind of go hand in hand the whole way through.
Katie Pace Miles:I just want to use the word exhaust. I want to Danielle saying you use your decoding first and that's exactly right. I talked to a group of teachers and I said exhaust your phonics skills, like have students go in and use everything they've got with regards to their phonics skills in order to read the word first and then exactly what. You know what Danielle's saying.
Lori:We've got a, there's other tools we can use, so helpful and I'm so glad we've given such practical examples so it's really connective for teachers listening. I'm wondering if there's anything else that you both would like to share, or anything else that you haven't said or mentioned yet that you'd like to leave our listeners with.
Melissa:Danielle, I know you mentioned morphology. I don't know if we covered it or not.
Danielle Colenbrander:Yeah, I haven't said much about that and I could probably talk about that for another six hours, but I won't. Okay. So in English we have cases where graphyphonium correspondences are not regular because the relationships between the morphological relationships are preserved in the spelling. So, for example, you have kicked, kissed or moved, so they end in different sounds, versus, but they both, they all, end in the spelling because that is representing the past tense morpheme, telling us the action happened in the past, and that's true throughout English spelling. So when students know that, then they have another tool for breaking downwards and understanding why they are spelled, the way they are spelled, and so that can be really helpful. And it can be helpful from you know, if we look at the type of language that children are exposed to, that can give us a guide as to the kinds of morphemes that we might want to teach. So in the beginning, you know kids aren't coming across really long, complex words, but they might be coming across kissed or kicked or runs or teacher, for example. So you might start by teaching those really frequent sort of inflection or grammatical morphemes and then, as they move through schooling, you might get more complex and you might start teaching morphemes like nests or mint, the derivational morphemes, and you might also start teaching them about their Latin or Greek bases in the words and the relationships of those two whole families of words that come from the same etymological root and say morphological family. So that is another thing that you can teach students to give them a tool to help with their reading and spelling.
Danielle Colenbrander:One thing I will say is that there's actually not very much research on teaching this to beginning readers. So I've been working on a meta-analysis of morphology instruction for reading and spelling. I've been working on it for literally years and it's about ready to submit now and in that meta-analysis we found that with beginning readers, so kids in the first two years of schooling there were actually only three studies that looked specifically at the effectiveness of teaching morphology for reading and spelling and the findings were really mixed. There just wasn't clear evidence there that it was working. And this is another situation of I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying we don't have enough evidence at this point to know that for sure that it does work, or how much we need to teach or exactly how we need to teach it. And so that's when we don't have that evidence, that's when we need to look at things like, as I was saying before, the kinds of language that students look at, that they'll have to read and then that can give us a guide as to the kind of information that we teach.
Danielle Colenbrander:When we're talking about older students, so grade three and above, there's actually quite good evidence that it will improve their ability to read and spell the words that you teach them. But for those younger students it's still a bit of a gray area and I think you could start introducing that once students have a pretty good grasp of the basic graphy and phonemic correspondences. If you start introducing it really early, before they have a decent grasp of decoding, it's just going to be confusing and it's not going to be that practically helpful, in my opinion. Again, there's not a lot of research, but I think once they start to read those words that do have more than one morpheme, that's when you can start introducing them. So, yeah, that's a very, I guess, brief overview of morphology, but it is an important tool that you can have, and some words that seem irregular or seem like the spelling is inexplicable. Once you know something about morphology, the spelling becomes clearer or more understandable or more easy to remember.
Lori:It's helpful. Well, open invitation to come back once that is out and about in the world. Katie, is there anything you wanted to add or say different than that? Like, leave us with a final thought.
Katie Pace Miles:That was so great, danielle. I'm going to add something, maybe slightly, just with the younger students. I loved what you said, danielle. Actually it's just like Danielle always is such a good colleague about what do we have evidence on and what are we translating from what we have? And I do want to just sit a second in that space of working with so many teachers in the pre-K to second grade arena and they're constantly saying to me well, what could we do about this?
Katie Pace Miles:These teachers, every single day, are trying to come up with activities that keep students engaged. And that's a very different place of being a researcher, like Danielle and I are, and we are trying to create really controlled studies with all kinds of parameters on it to really isolate a particular activity and analyze the difference between that activity and this activity, and we're literally tasked with keeping these activities under wraps. They cannot change really necessarily. If we've designed the experiment this way, they cannot change over time within this experiment and having been a former teacher, I know that that's almost impossible. Like you're tap dancing on Monday, right, and then you're doing jazz hands on Tuesday and while you're doing word analysis to try and keep students engaged.
Katie Pace Miles:And I just want to acknowledge that too, that teachers are doing their very best, especially in this moment where they're learning about experimental research, often called reading science in the field, they're doing their very best to take this and make it very practical for their classrooms. And so we all play a role here and, like, danielle is playing just this incredible role of running outstanding experimental designs, and we need that so much. And teachers are playing this incredible role of saying, well, what does that mean for me? And other individuals are saying, well, we could take some of this, we could do some translation, but we can't go too far from the target too.
Katie Pace Miles:There's some great individuals in our field that'll be like OK, we're not over here in left field anymore, right, where we're just focusing, we're not, we're ignoring the letters. You've got to be somewhere in this context of make sure you're anchoring students to the graphing phonemes in those words. And then let's think about how we could do that to keep students engaged, day after day, word after word, so that we get as many words anchored in memory so that when they see them they can be automatically retrieved as a sight word. I brought us back to our beginning with sight words. They didn't know I would be Beautiful, full seco.
Melissa:I'm wondering if you all have any resources or places that you can send teachers to learn any more about these tools they can have in their toolbox, or places to learn about anything that we shared today. I have this free.
Katie Pace Miles:I'm always giving out this free, Like it's got a green cover on it. It's this free word analysis activities, and teachers are always but these are my grad students always are saying, like all right, Katie, well, what would you come up with? Like, what would you do? And so one time I just sat there and was like here's some different ways that I could think to have students anchor themselves as best as possible to these words. And, Daniel, I've got to send it to you too, because I really do love an experiment from 2022. And I tried my best to do mispronunciation analysis with some words that based on teachers grapho-phenetic knowledge and students grapho-phenetic knowledge. You would apply these to maybe some irregular words and I did my best. So it's just a free resource I'm happy to send out.
Lori:Amazing. Well, if you want to send it to us, we can link it and then you won't get a ton of emails. We'll make sure we put it in our newsletter. So I think we don't want to inundate you with 10,000 emails.
Melissa:You know, on the and you have a lot on your website too, right, Katie? It's KatiePaysmilesphdcom.
Katie Pace Miles:That's right, and I will go on there right now and make sure it's the most up-to-date one that I gave out. I'm I like put it up on a QR code at Plain Talk, so I'll make sure that it's the most up-to-date one too.
Lori:Thank you, katie, that's cool. Thanks, all right, daniel. Any recommendations for resources? Where should we go? What should we do?
Danielle Colenbrander:Well, if you really want to, you can read my papers. Yes, we're going to.
Lori:we're going to link them in the show notes, so no worries then.
Danielle Colenbrander:Yeah, and I have a couple of other podcasts where I'm talking about the same thing or similar things. So if you want to hear me talk more about the same topics, you can go to those, and I'll also have a think about whether there's anything else that I could send you.
Lori:Yep, and we will link those other podcasts as well. I love listening to both of you. Katie, I saw you a couple of years ago at the reading league and then like stalked you afterwards. But there was a long line to talk with you and Daniel, I just your pieces are just so clear and we appreciate your work as well.
Danielle Colenbrander:And I heard you on teaching literacy podcast, which is how I learned about you, so another loop being closed.
Lori:Yes, exactly. Well, thank you both so much. This was such a treat, and we appreciate everyone waking up early and staying at work late so that we could make this happen due to time zones. So thank you, oh, pleasure.
Danielle Colenbrander:Thank you for inviting me and lovely to see you, katie, and hopefully one day we'll be in person.
Katie Pace Miles:I can't wait for that day. This will just be wonderful. I feel the same. This is such an awesome opportunity. I often talk about Daniel's resources. This is just incredible to get together and have a chat.
Melissa:Yay, thank you. Thank you so much To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
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Lori:We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us.