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Ep. 211: Building Fluency with POSSUM with Melissa Orkin and Maryanne Wolf

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Fluency is a crucial aspect of reading. It involves automaticity and the ability to connect different aspects of word knowledge.

In this episode, Maryanne Wolf and Melissa Orkin discuss:

  • the importance of fluency in reading
  • the factors that contribute to fluent reading
  • the need for an integrative approach to fluency instruction 
  • the POSSUM approach to building word knowledge

Big Takeaway: Fluency is essential for comprehension and has social-emotional implications for struggling readers. The POSSUM approach can help students make the needed connections to be able to read fluently. 

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We answer your questions about teaching reading in 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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Lori:

Teaching all of the different aspects of reading can feel overwhelming. Juggling phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension is all so much to do every single day.

Melissa:

Well, good news because in this episode, researchers Marianne Wolfe and Melissa Orkin will share an explicit instructional approach that brings all of these pieces together in a meaningful way that helps students build word knowledge, bridge phonics and comprehension, and increase fluency.

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 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:

Lori, and I can't wait to keep learning with you today.

Lori:

Hi everyone. Today we are talking about how you can help your students build fluency skills, and our guests today are amazing and have created a super cool approach to increasing reading fluency.

Melissa:

Yeah, amazing guests is right. We have Marianne Wolfe, who you may know as the author of books such as Proust and the Squid and Reader Come Home, both excellent books if you haven't read them. She also directs the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice at the University of California, Los Angeles. And then, also joining Marianne, we have Melissa Orkin, and Melissa is a former teacher, developmental psychologist and director of Crafting Minds, which is an educational consulting practice. So welcome Marianne and Melissa. Thank you, Our pleasure.

Melissa:

All right, so we're talking all about fluency today and we wanted to just first set the stage here and just define what we mean when we talk about fluency. And I actually wanted to quote one of your articles, if that's okay, where you said something that really blew my mind. You said within 280 milliseconds of encountering a word, a fluent reader not only recognizes the sounds of letters and matches them to their visual symbols, they also activate all associated word meanings and knowledge of text structure. So can you all just start with defining for us, or describing a fluent reader in terms of what I just shared and all the things that go into becoming a fluent reader?

Melissa Orkin:

Sure, yeah, I can start. So, yeah, I mean, I think that what you're pointing out, melissa, is so amazing and really miraculous, especially because we are not born to read. But reading becomes this really automatic subconscious process, and the automaticity with which we read is really key to our development as humans, as literate humans and as thinkers. And you know, oftentimes. So I have a chance to be out in the field with teachers on an almost daily basis. Influency is something that we're all talking about and I know that you have done a number of episodes about fluency and there are so many great strategies that we can use and it's something that I'm often kind of exploring with different educators and I'll say to them you know, how would you define fluency? And usually you know they'll think for a moment and they'll jot down some ideas. It will be something about that readers are reading with accuracy and good rate and that they demonstrate prosody. These are all totally true. When I then say, well, how would you build fluency among your readers, they would say, well, we would improve accuracy, we would improve rate and we would kind of model prosody, prosody being, like you know, reading naturally. And again, it's all true. But I think what you know so much of the research around the neuroscience of reading and that's you know part of the source from which you got that information about how long does it take our brain to read. That's you know part of the source from which you got that information about how long does it take our brain to read. That's all done through kind of neuroimaging research.

Melissa Orkin:

Some of the research from neuroscience has indicated that fluency.

Melissa Orkin:

What you're seeing when you're sitting next to a reader is that they're reading accurately and they have a good rate and they're reading with good sort of tone to their language.

Melissa Orkin:

But what's happening in the brain is that the brain is automatically connecting all of these different aspects of word knowledge. So instead of just looking at the letter patterns and saying the sounds, the brain is automatically, within milliseconds, connecting letter patterns to word meaning, to the job the word's playing in a sentence, to if there is an ending, thinking about what the ending is doing, to the meaning of the words or the phrase and then putting it all together in comprehension. It's connecting these different aspects of word knowledge and I think that when we think about fluency from that perspective, that really fluency indicates that the reader is able to connect the multiple aspects of word knowledge. That shifts how we teach fluency. We teach to building automaticity across these aspects of word knowledge, whether it's letter patterns and sounds and word meanings and parts of speech, and then we also use activities that are going to allow students to practice the connection across these different aspects of word knowledge. So I would say that's the definition that I find is helpful for educators in thinking about how to plan fluency activities for students.

Melissa:

Yep, Along with that, Melissa. You guys, you all talked about retrieval and I'm wondering if you wanted to add in what? How is retrieval related to fluency?

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so I mean Marianne. So much of Marianne's work is about retrieval related to fluency. Yeah, so I mean Marianne. So much of Marianne's work is about retrieval. And you know, just to give you an idea of how important you know retrieval is when I first started working with Marianne so I'm a former student of Marianne's and we worked together for about 15 years at a university outside of Boston called Tufts University, university outside of Boston called Tufts University.

Melissa Orkin:

She had a center for reading and language development there and I came to Marianne being trained in a number of different programs. I was Orton Gillingham trained and I wore these trainings like a badge. I thought I knew everything basically, and I was kind of coming to just get Marianne's stamp of approval. I thought she was just going to like rubber stamp and walk away. But instead she said tell me more about your students' fluency that you've been working with. And whereas Orton-Gillingham and other phonics programs had been sufficient for some students to become fluent, I had a whole subset of students that were not becoming fluent with these really strong phonics programs, and that is where I started to understand the importance of retrieval in our reading circuit. So Marianne, I'm sure, will be much more eloquent in describing this so I will defer to her. But it is a key piece of this puzzle for many students.

Maryanne Wolf:

I will add a few things. The reality is an unusual one because years and years ago there was only one agreed upon area of, let's say, deficit or weakness, and it was the phonological, and that we really wanted to figure out how to treat. Phoneme awareness and phonological skills and phonics made all kinds of good sense and always will, because that is an issue. But with another researcher named Pat Bowers from Canada, we did something that was considered at the time subversive. We disagreed. We said our children that we see in clinics every day have more than just a phonological weakness as manifested as phoneme awareness. And I had been working with a neurologist named Martha Denkla and her former colleague Rita Riddell on how can we understand another weakness that seems to be related to fluency. But we weren't sure what that X factor was, and it turned out to be the speed with which the brain connected visual and language processes and retrieved whatever the label was, whether it was for a letter, a number, a color object or a picture, so the name of an object. And what we ultimately found across time and this goes all the way into recent work, fairly recent work with well, at John Gabrielli's lab and my lab with Ola Ozonoff-Palachuk, we studied all these children and we had been studying them for 20 years and finding this what we call the RAN indexed deficit. That was why, originally, we talked about a double deficit, not that there were ever only two, but that this area was beyond and different from a phonological weakness. So by now all this research has come together and we see that, you know, about 20% of our children only have, let's say, a more pure phonological weakness, phonological weakness. Another 20, 25 have only a fluency-based RAN-indexed weakness, but that the majority of our children, like 70% of the kids who are struggling with dyslexia or other forms of struggle, have both a phoneme awareness indexed and a fluency-based weakness.

Maryanne Wolf:

Now, it was retrieval that cued us into that. What would become a fluency weakness? So when you think of the children who are most seriously impaired, you have to realize that about 70% of them have these issues. Now what Melissa described was the next stage what are all the contributors to that weakness that we call RAND index fluency issues? And that's when, let's say, my cap, as not just a cognitive neuroscientist but as a linguist, was coming together and we realized, by studying the reading brain, that there are all these different contributors to the rapid retrieval. Now the implication for Melissa and all of us was that that means if we're only working on phonics and phoneme awareness, we are neglecting the other contributors to this weakness that will manifest itself.

Maryanne Wolf:

Usually we can find it out through a RAN-RAS, which is simply a naming speed test that becomes automatic right Letters and numbers. That tells us that things are not working well underneath the hood. And so when people talk about a RAND deficit or a fluency deficit, we lift the hood up, we say it could be phonological, only unlikely it could be orthographic. And here's where the first possum comes. I'm getting ahead of the question. I'm sorry, but it's really where we were at that point. There were phonological, there were prosodic, there were orthographic connections. Were those letters represented well in those visual areas?

Maryanne Wolf:

The semantic system this is where retrieval is so important in two ways. Not only is the semantic let's see processing contribution important just for vocabulary, but it's so important for those kids and so many of our students with dyslexia and other issues, and here I'll add bilingual, multilingual kids. They're accessing all these different things. You see, working on semantics is not just about vocabulary and I really have to insist that people remember that. It's wonderful for vocabulary but it gives those who have a retrieval issue alternatives so that when they can't find one word, they can find one that's related to it. So we work on semantic networks and we also work on what's called polysemy, another P, but we put it under the S, where the same word can have multiple meanings, it's more than one. And then you think sem, s-e-m, semantics, poly, semi, and then of course the Y, but here you're moving ahead to the M, which is morphology.

Maryanne Wolf:

Knowledge of morphology helps everything. It's our secret sauce because it is a unit that's orthographically easy. It's a chunk, and it is giving us syntactic information. Is that a verb or a noun? But anyway, the U is more for written language, understanding the alphabetic principle or, if it's a different language, understanding the local syllabary principle. Whatever the language is, that's what the U, the understanding, is. And then the M is for morphology.

Maryanne Wolf:

But back to. I mean, if you put all that together, we used this acronym that Melissa and I use all the time because people can remember that when you're working with fluency, posm is what you are really insisting, is part of what you're doing in instruction and intervention to increase fluency, basically in different ways. We used possum as at the heart of an intervention that included work on phonics and phoneme awareness always and porosity, but that is so much wider. And then you have to actually step back and you think what are the foundational skills that the reading brain has? And you come to the not so surprising conclusion this is what the foundational skills are, and so many people have narrowly defined both the foundational skills and the science of reading as the P, the phonics and the phoneme awareness, and not realizing that the reading brain has if you just think of it as a wheel with the, you know the middle is being influenced by all of these spokes.

Melissa:

Lori and I are always also talking about fluency as, like the I don't know missing link, or people aren't talking about it enough or it's not happening enough. I'm wondering if you I'd love to just hear from you both of you know why is fluency so important and why should everyone care about it more.

Maryanne Wolf:

So the importance of fluency is that without it, you don't think you have to have a level of speed. Just think of how the brain works If it can't get all of this work done in possum, it has no time to allocate to thinking what it means. So fluency is the bridge, the multifaceted bridge to comprehension, and for me, comprehension we can talk about that later is not just one big term. Just as foundational skills have multiple influences, comprehension has multiple aspects, which I call deep reading. That's in the Melissa you mentioned reader come home, the reading brain in a digital world. Well, the bridge is fluency and it is not by repeated reading that you're going to get to the ability to allocate time and attention to the thinking skills that we call comprehension.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean I think that you know you captured it really nicely. I mean, I'm sure as educators you know, melissa and Laura, you've sat with children and you've seen them, you know really labor over text and you know that when you ask them afterwards, you know tell me what that was about. You know what was the problem there, you know how did it get resolved. You can see just, first of all, how exhausted they are and, second of all, that they weren't able to hold onto that information. And I know when I read with students who are disfluent, they're more likely to guess, they're more likely to start to become avoidant with tasks. They're more likely to, you know, engage me in like off-task conversations because they're just exhausted. They clearly don't have the stamina or the automaticity to get through the passage and it's it's totally labored for them. So so I think that's what it looks like in a, in a reading behavior, and I think what Marianne is pointing out is just like the cognitive processes that are involved.

Maryanne Wolf:

But you know what Melissa always reminds me and this is what she said is so important If you ask all these kids what's wrong, they will use words that mean it's too laborious, and then that translates. And I want to say that Melissa and another person who's worked with me, rebecca Gottlieb, has underscored what I knew as a mother but never included as a researcher, and that's the affective component. When you are so laborious and you just can't read faster, it makes the whole process seem impossible, which then is like the social emotional aspect that can either help you soar and persevere or stymie you and you get arrested. So fluency is a major aspect cognitively, but it also affects the social emotional. Really, it's so much more than the word fluency. It's so much more.

Lori:

Okay, I think we can dig a little deeper now into what we can do to help students become fluent readers. I know you developed this framework, posm, and I'm just going to repeat it for everyone listening. So the POSM approach to build word knowledge is phonology, orthography, syntax, semantics, understanding, morphology. You all are going to tell us a little bit more about each element than you already have. I think you could probably talk all day about each one, probably right. But I also would love to hear at some point I want to go back to that idea of repeated readings, because I want to make sure that we are not leaving teachers hanging here who are listening to this.

Lori:

If I'm a teacher listening, I'm thinking, okay, possum sounds awesome and it sounds really important, and it's probably a lot of what I'm doing. Maybe there's some tweaks I can make. Right To like go even deeper and to be even more possum-y in my classroom with my students. But what about this repeated reading thing? Is it something that should? We be doing repeated readings and not doing them? Is there a hard and fast rule? And I'm really just asking for teachers listening who are sitting there thinking, okay, well, I've been doing some repeated readings, I've been doing some paragraph shrinking. What does all this mean?

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, I mean, I completely understand. I think for a long time it seemed like repeated reading was the endorsed sort of you know way to fluency, and I think that there is a level of overlearning that needs to happen in order to develop automaticity, particularly among students who are maybe scoring in below benchmark ranges on benchmark measures or screening measures, or perhaps have been identified with a specific learning disability in reading, like dyslexia, and that overlearning requires, you know, an exponential number of exposures compared to a typical student, whereas a typical student might be able to, you know, recognize, you know, might be able to, you know, recognize, you know, a word or a letter pattern or, you know, ending with 10 exposures. You know a student who is dyslexic might need like 100 or 150 exposures. So how do you do that? You know there is some level of repetition.

Melissa Orkin:

I think that, where you know, there are some concerns that are being raised and I know another colleague of ours, elizabeth Norton at Northwestern University, just wrote an article for the Reading League Journal about repeated reading and really looking at the effect sizes of studies that had used repeated reading interventions versus just reading interventions, like what is the specific benefit of repetition? And I would really say, you know, lori, like for whom. I think there are those kids who love to practice a passage and it helps build their sense of competence and they really enjoy seeing you know there. I know so many different programs that will like time you and they'll give you, you know, incentives and they'll show you how your time's going down and that helps build their confidence. So that could be one tool.

Melissa Orkin:

But I think that where Marianne and I and others are concerned, is that if it's the only tool that you're using, then there isn't really a strategy that students can use that they can generalize to passages that they haven't repeated, can use that they can generalize to passages that they haven't repeated. So part of the reason that we are, you know, taking our show on the road and talking about possum so much and really trying to help, you know teachers understand the multiple aspects of word knowledge, is so that they have strategies that they can. You know um repetition or practice, cause that certainly is a piece, but I think um to caution teachers as using that as their whole approach to fluency.

Lori:

Thank you, that's so helpful. Okay, so, if there, if there's nothing else that we want to say about that, marianne, if you feel like Melissa covered it, then we can roll into the. I'd love to hear an overview of each, each one, like anything that you didn't say yet that you'd like to share. About possum Cause I know we already started talking about it how can you not and I'm really, I'm really again kind of digging it as this integrated, this integrated model, this, what, what is it? Cog and wheel.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, multi-competential yeah.

Maryanne Wolf:

I'm going to begin by saying that in the very beginning of our understanding of the richness of retrieval, the obvious is that the question becomes what do you do about it? And that's where I think Melissa and I are going to move into that. Our first efforts because of Reed Lyon who, with Robin Morris and Maureen Lovett, encouraged us to go after a research grant to prepare us for writing interventions. So Reed said try to get this award, if you will, for research that will prove this is important for increasing fluency, increasing reading in our most impaired readers. So that began what was really almost 15 years of research on different interventions and Melissa used the word multi-component, or multi-componential interventions that never neglect phonics and phoneme awareness but go beyond it. And so what we did was create the first program which we have, I guess you might say, some of the best evidence for from randomized control treatment studies showing that the multi-component approach is better than phonics, which is better than just normal classroom.

Maryanne Wolf:

So what is that multi-component? We tried two different forms of it. One is called Empower, by my colleague, maureen Lovett, and that goes after metacognitive strategies for phonology, orthography and morphology and morphology. We tried a somewhat more comprehensive approach, which is what POSM really is and that is to go with an approach in intervention that would systematically and here's where it gets really important to think not am I doing phonics or phoneme awareness, but am I connecting it to the rest of possum?

Maryanne Wolf:

So we eventually built a program called Revo in which it's all about taking words in all of these spokes in all of these spokes. So we looked at it in terms of the semantic knowledge, the polysemous knowledge of we choose those only polysemous words actually and then we connected it to the orthographic patterns. We can always connecting it to the how the phonemes and the letters you know work together. So that's never a neglect of phonics, but it's always connecting it to orthographic patterns that they learn and acquire over time through, basically, some strategies, rhyme and starter strategies. So we use both, if you want to use technical terms, analytic phonics and synthetic phonics if you want to use the technical terms. But we're always connecting those same words with those same patterns to their meanings and their grammatical uses.

Melissa:

Marian, really quick, I'm sorry. Can you just? I know that our guests or listeners are probably thinking about the analytic and synthetic phonics that you just mentioned. Can you just talk about how it addresses both? So?

Maryanne Wolf:

we want to be sure that they have the concept. This is part of understanding the alphabetic principles is the U? Oh, look at these letters, what letters can be. They turn words we can say into words we can see. So we're teaching them the alphabetic principle that a word has sounds and then they work on, let's say, bat, and they see the bat at and then ever faster until they literally put the sounds together. But they've analyzed the sounds and the words.

Maryanne Wolf:

But the synthetic is that we use another strategy of basketball basically, where we teach them after they know these sounds and the letters that represent those sounds, we teach them to spy the rhyme pattern and they learn so with bat. They spy the at and they jam it together. They jam the A-T, synthesize those sounds in a rhyme and then synthesize the starter, so the batet slam dunk. So we teach them both analytic, because that really is a key piece and that's. Janine Heron really talks about encoding and all of that before kids ever come to school. She's really taught me a great deal about that. Kids ever come to school, she's really taught me a great deal about that. But that it's a part of a piece and so we add the more synthetic, through strategies that go after rhyme patterns, and we want to know, we want the kids to know. Oh, and Melissa said something that was so important. That's something that is so important Our kids the kids that are mine really have the most struggles, and so when we represent rhyme, it has to have a lot of exposure.

Maryanne Wolf:

So you know I've said this probably a thousand times One of the three worst words ever used in education were our kill and drill. That is not what we are doing. We are giving them multiple exposures because they're so needed. Now, some kids only need 10, but our kids need many. So part of this work on possum is to give them multiple exposures in all kinds of ways. Possum is to give them multiple exposures in all kinds of ways. And then, of course, we teach. You know I guess it's sort of funny, but I may be one of the few people left who missed diagramming.

Maryanne Wolf:

Nobody is teaching that, and okay, fine, but we're going to teach them nouns and verbs and how they work, and how a word can be a noun, like a bat that's your bat, or a noun can be a verb a bat that you bat and so we teach this other aspect of both syntax and polysemy. And then we teach more themes that add the endings so that batting, batted. There's more than you know, more than meets the eye. There they are learning the unit, they're learning that that's a verb, they're learning that it can, depending on the word, the rhyme, need a double trouble letter like bat and batting. So all these are part and parcel of connections. I think for Melissa and for me, one of the real missing aspects of fluency training is that and this is happening across the country they get morphology in third grade. They're lucky, instead of really thinking seriously about how the brain is this wheel with a spokes and we're making those spokes so firmly in there the wheel can turn and turn to turn. I hadn't thought of that, lori, I love that.

Lori:

Yeah, I think it's so challenging too, because what you're saying, marianne, isn't easy. It's much easier to think about, like, okay, vocabulary is a compartmentalized thing, right? Or I do vocabulary when I have this book, when my students respond in this book, but really everything that you're speaking up is just so. The word integrated keeps coming to mind and I think that's why the Coggin Wheel is really resonating with me, because it's just thinking about the brain in the middle and then all of these feeders, and it's just it's not happening when like, okay, I'm teaching vocabulary here, no, I'm teaching this text, I'm teaching this concept, and then all of these things happen all the time, like, and it's just so integrated, it's so natural with how we learn all the time and every day.

Melissa Orkin:

You know, as I said, we're out working with teachers all the time. Everybody has questions about fluency. People have decodable texts but they didn't quite know. You know, beyond repeated reading, how can you build fluency in a strategic way? So what we do with teachers and we've just created a resource for this is we show them how to apply possum to the text that they have.

Melissa Orkin:

So the sounds, the phonology is, you know, the sounds in words. So what we do is we start by. So Marianne's program, ravo, is very top down. So it's like she started with a word, because that is a word that has multiple meanings. Multiple meaning words are great because we know that the more you know about a word, the more associations. The faster you read a word and this is some really exciting work by Penny Pexman and others about you know, the more memories you have with a word, the more features it has, the more associations it has, the faster you read it, and so it's not just about the letter patterns, it's also about sort of how robustly stored that word is in your brain. So Marianne starts with the word, uses the word for the meanings and the rhyme patterns and then builds the word into sentences, what we did in Crafting Minds with our series Decoding Duo is we started with the book and we pulled the sentences and the words out of the book and so that we kind of worked from the bottom up and she worked from the top down. I mean, if you have teachers who just have any decodable, they can use this strategy. They can use this strategy with a curriculum. They don't have to invest in another program. And so what we did was we pulled sentences out that have the concept that we want to work on and, as Marianne said, we love rhyme patterns.

Melissa Orkin:

Rhyme patterns are such a great orthographic concept for building automaticity because it's a chunk of the word and the rhyme pattern will reliably help the reader pronounce the vowel sound. So think of a word like best or beast. What is cuing you in to how to pronounce the E? Are the letters that follow it E-A-S-T or E-S-T? So that rhyme pattern is so helpful and there have been a number of studies done on the value of recognizing rhyme patterns and there also has just been some research on how frequent rhyme patterns are in English. Like there was some research I was reading that said like 17,000 words that are part of like kind of our common lexicon in English are made up out of just 400 rhyme patterns that have been kind of used in different combinations, so that real, you know automaticity.

Melissa Orkin:

If you want to work on automaticity instead of working on it on a single letter, like drilling just single letter cards, we're kind of with a rhyme pattern. The same could be said for some of our continent blends that function as like our starter sounds, sounds like SP or STR or SL, like being able to see that as a unit and recognize it and pronounce it automatically really speeds up that word recognition. We want kids to go from reading a word like trick, you know, being able to isolate and identify each sound t-r-i-c, to seeing it as t-r-i-c and then to just seeing it and saying it trick. Some kids can make that kind of jump that they can do that orthographic mapping. Others need that kind of intermediary step where they're able to, you know, recognize the T-R and they're able to recognize the TR and they're able to recognize the ICK. And if they know trick, as Marianne says in RAVO, then they know sick, then they know flick, then they know slick. There's even a lot of practice with reading words by rhyme pattern first. That can be a great tool, which is called backwards decoding, because, again, it helps you retrieve the information in your auditory memory. So rhyme patterns are just great for all of these reasons.

Melissa Orkin:

Then, in terms of the semantic we talked about using, you know, thinking of multiple meanings of words and eliciting from students their associations to the word. So staying with that word trick, trick is a multiple meaning word, right? So, melissa, what's one meaning of the word? So staying with that word trick, trick is a multiple meaning word, right? So, melissa, what's one meaning of the word trick that you think of? Like a magic trick? Like a magic trick? Or, lori, what's one meaning of the word trick that you think of?

Lori:

I was thinking like playing a game on someone, like a trick, yeah.

Melissa Orkin:

To like, you know, to maybe to fool them or something like that. Right, like to play it. So it's like a verb or a noun Right. And so I might start with you, lori, and I might say so tell me, is there a time when you've played a trick on someone? What was that like? How does that feel? Because what I'm doing is I'm activating your whole semantic neighborhood around the word trick and I'm helping with the retrieval. So the more robust those activations, the better able you'll be, lori, when you see that word trick in print, to retrieve it.

Melissa:

Melissa real quick, is this where I think you all gave an example about the words lion and lime and I was my mind was blown. I was like, oh my gosh, this is so cool yeah.

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, so that was. I think that was a research study done by Paxman. But I have look, don't quote me on that, let me double check the research. There was a Hargraves. It's really old. It is old, it's like 2002. I mean, it's relatively old, but okay, I'll just. I'll describe that quickly. So, basically, the researchers were really thoughtful. I love these like very clever research studies. They were very thoughtful in designing the study.

Melissa Orkin:

They were trying to figure out, like, what contributes to the speed with which we visually recognize words. That's the big question, right. Like how do we more quickly and automatically recognize words? So they took pairs of words and they paired them together because there would be these similarities. So lion and lime were paired because they both start with L-I. They both are four letters, but actually one of them has a very common spelling pattern I-M-E, vowel consonant E, i-n, i-o-n. Like how many words can you think of with I-O-N? Very few, right. Many words can you think of with I-O-N? Very few, right. So then what they did was they would be. You know, they have this like very elaborate contraption and they can tell how quickly it takes a participant to read the word and then afterwards for all of the pairs of words. They had them write down all of their associations for those words in like 60 seconds or something. They gave them a time limit.

Lori:

And would the associations just to kind of clarify for the listeners like lime, fruit, green, exactly yeah.

Melissa Orkin:

Citrus, right, yeah, peel tree, that sort of thing, yeah, yeah. So it turns out that lion has three times the number of associations compared to Lyme. So even though Lyin is a less common letter pattern, lyin is read more quickly because that semantic neighborhood is chock full of all of these associations, and so I think that really so well illustrates this idea that certainly you know, patterns, orthographic spelling patterns, are a big piece of the puzzle, but it's not everything. And, as Marianne said, you know, retrieval of word meanings helps us sometimes compensate or support the whole reading circuit, and so the more that we can look for these opportunities to build this work into our instruction, the more robust the student's retrieval will be. So we talked about phonology and orthography and semantics.

Melissa Orkin:

Syntax is parts of speech, so thinking about the parts of speech and giving kids an opportunity to scoop sentences I actually just watched a fluency presentation that you both did, melissa and Lori I know this is your show, but I'm going to highlight your work and you talked about the importance of breaking up sentences into phrases. Right, and why did you decide to highlight that strategy?

Lori:

Well, I think we decided to highlight it because it's a really tangible thing that both teachers and students can see and do. In order to help track, so that it's not word by word reading, we're helping students put those words in phrases so that they can read them more fluently, more cohesively and build understanding through the phrasing. Yeah, exactly.

Melissa Orkin:

It breaks it up into its syntactic structures, right, Like who or what is a sentence about? What are they doing? Where or how are they doing it? It's the subject phrase, the predicate phrase, the prepositional phrase, and that's such a nice way to make sure that kids have that opportunity to see the you know words grouped together but to also not feel overwhelmed by it. And then the last part, the morphology. I mean, as Marianne said, it's the secret sauce. So being able to play with prefixes and suffixes, even if you're doing phonics work, playing with how does this change the ending?

Melissa Orkin:

In Revo, Marianne has coined this amazing term for suffixes and prefixes, but I think you only talk about suffixes, but it would work for either, and they're called ender benders. Ender benders and teachers were training in Revo always say but they're being taught the term suffixes, and I said but suffix doesn't anchor them with anything, Whereas ender bender is a nice anchor about language. This is a part of language that comes at the end of a base word and it bends the meaning, it changes the meaning and you get that bonus of not only recognizing a pattern of letters, like you know, F-U-L or N-E-S-S or E-S-T, but it also helps you think about. How does this change the meaning of the base word, how does it support my overall understanding of this sentence or text? This sentence or text so looking for that integrative opportunity is so powerful for kids.

Maryanne Wolf:

In the old Revolve, we haven't understood or I haven't begun the research on deep reading, and over the last years that has become so important to me. And deep reading includes empathy, background knowledge, critical analysis, critical thinking, and you think, well, what can first and second and third graders do with deep reading? You can begin it, and so the new E in RAVO is going to be empathy and it's going to all. I'm rewriting all the stories, the little decodable text, so that they and new stories that promote, in this troubled world of ours, more empathy and more critical thinking, like mysteries, and also and here I really will say that Melissa's work on the social, emotional aspects of our struggling readers and my colleague, rebecca Gottlieb have really influenced me to do more on perseverance and persistence and even having a character named Sammy the Slug who will persevere till the end. And I want you to know that.

Maryanne Wolf:

As we talk about fluency and you ask me, melissa and Lori, and you've asked us, why is it so important? It is important so that our next generation, important, so that our next generation, our kids, many of whom are so creative and it's not released because they aren't fluent enough to get to the point where they can think for themselves, and I want you to know we have new strategies, if you will, for insisting our kids can persevere and reach their own thinking, their own thoughts, and that's what fluency is about. Fluency is about releasing them from the laboriousness, not that they're fast, but that they are fast enough to think at a different level, enough to think at a different level, a level in which empathy and critical thinking and even new thoughts, new insights can happen for them.

Melissa Orkin:

You know. I think that probably when we think about fluency instruction for students and we think about, you know, the different practices that you can use, I think what Marianne and I are hoping is that this multi-competential approach offers teachers a framework and understanding that students might need varying degrees of intensity with this instruction. Some, as we said, might need, you know, a few exposures. Others might need more systematic kind of small group or tier three intensive work. But the idea of moving away from word work and isolation and moving towards a more connective approach and using possum as that way, like, okay, I'm going to work on this concept, maybe starting with phonics concept, because that's kind of the easiest sometimes.

Melissa Orkin:

And then how can I build in a little vocabulary activity? Are there any multiple meaning words that have this pattern in it? Actually, I have this great resource that gives you words and like it's a word finder and so if you type in a letter pattern, it'll find all the words with that pattern in it. So if you're looking for, like, ik words or you're looking for app words, so it'll give you lots of opportunities to think of. You know words. I think something like 70% of English words are multiple meaning words, so there's so many.

Lori:

Can you share what it is or can you ask for the show notes?

Melissa Orkin:

Yeah, it's wordfinderyourdictionarycom and I'll just send you the link. Okay, thank you, we'll put it in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, so that's a great resource. So I think, moving towards that multi-competential piece, or if you're doing a vocabulary routine with the students, can you then break up that word into base word or onset and rhyme and can you think of other words with that rhyme pattern and can you then practice with adding suffixes or prefixes onto that rhyme pattern. Doing this more integrative instruction will help students make those connections, particularly those students who need a greater level of unfolding with that process.

Melissa:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think. I love thinking about it that way, that where you would normally just touch on maybe one of the aspects of POSM, think about how you can bring in more aspects, all of them, if you can. Well, melissa, is there anything else you wanted to share with us?

Melissa Orkin:

I mean, you know, we have some free samples of lessons. As I said, we have some resources for common decodable texts and we have some free samples of lessons on our website, so feel free to visit us there. It's craftingmindsgroupcom.

Melissa:

Yep, we'll add those to our show notes too, so everyone has those and yeah, I think just. Thank you so much for sharing all of this amazing information with us today and all of your time and Marianne's. Make sure you tell her, thank you for us.

Melissa Orkin:

She had to hop off early. Thanks for the opportunity, Melissa and Lori. It's been great.

Melissa:

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Lori:

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Melissa:

Just a quick reminder that the views and opinions expressed by the hosts and guests of the Melissa and Lori Love Literacy podcast are not necessarily the opinions of Great Minds PBC or its employees.

Lori:

We appreciate you so much and we're so glad you're here to learn with us. Thank, you.