Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ™

Helping Students Read Multisyllabic Words with Devin Kearns

Share episode

Episode 228 

If you’ve ever wondered how to help your students decode longer words, this episode is for you! We’re joined by literacy researcher and professor Devin Kearns to talk all about teaching multisyllabic words.

Many phonics programs focus on single-syllable words, but what happens when students hit big words and get stuck? Devin unpacks the research behind why that happens and what we can do instead. We talk about:

  • flexible decoding strategies,
  • when and how to teach syllables and morphemes,
  • and what “set for variability” really looks like in the classroom (spoiler: it’s not guessing!).

You’ll walk away with practical, research-backed ideas to help your students read longer words with confidence.

Devin M. Kearns, Ph.D., is the Goodnight Distinguished Professor in Early Literacy at NC State, where he studies early reading and collaborates with experts in psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to explore the brain basis of reading.


RESOURCES


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.

Grab free resources and episode alerts! Sign up for our email list at literacypodcast.com.

Join our community on Facebook, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter.

Lori:

We've heard this from many of you your students are doing well reading single-syllable words, but now they're moving to more difficult texts with multi-syllabic words and they're getting stuck, especially when the patterns aren't predictable.

Melissa:

If that sounds familiar, you are going to love this episode. Researcher and professor Devin Kearns is here to break down what the research really says about teaching students to read longer words and how to help your students tackle them.

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 Devin, Welcome to the podcast.

Devin Kearns:

Thank you for having me so excited to be with you.

Lori:

Yeah, we've been waiting for a long time to have you on, so thank you for being here.

Melissa:

That is true, that is true. All right, so we're going to jump right in with some tough questions for you. But we really wanted to think about. We know we always hear that students around like third grade. It's always third grade that students start to hit. You know they move from single syllable words and reading those to reading these multi-syllabic words and sometimes they like hit this wall. And so we want to hear from you, like you're an expert on reading multi-syllabic words or poly-syllabic words. So why is it that students often hit this wall?

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so why did it hit this wall? Yeah, so why do they hit this wall? Well, a lot changes about the long words. One thing that changes is that they are almost all polysyllabic words have a schwa sound. Right, so that is without. That's not true for like compound words, but most words in English are complex. They have more than one morpheme and in any word that has more than one syllable you're going to have a schwa sound. It's like an about, right, it's not about. It's not a about, it's about, and that's something we have to do on every single word. So if you aren't sure what to do, then with these schwa sounds you don't really recognize that. That's important. It becomes really challenging with these schwa sounds.

Melissa:

you don't really recognize that. That's important. It becomes really challenging and we've just taught students all the short vowel sounds, long vowel sounds, and then we are throwing this whole other sound in there. Oh right, exactly.

Devin Kearns:

And this thing happens where the single letter vowels like A and razor now have a long sound, and that's not something that they learned before, typically right. So now you have to deal with the fact that, like oh, these single letter vowels have multiple pronunciations and that combination of factors makes reading these long words really challenging. And after first grade the number of words of more than one syllable increases really dramatically through middle school. So it's a problem that happens because the words get harder and get longer and students have to deal with those.

Melissa:

I think I heard you say the majority of words and texts are multisyllabic, like once we get past those early grade levels. Is that right?

Devin Kearns:

After first grade, more than 50% of the new words we encounter have more than one syllable.

Lori:

And I imagine there's just a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong as you're sounding out those multi-syllabic words, because there's lots of different parts of them that could have different sounds, and so, as you're trying to put it together, you really have to have some sort of idea of what the word is in your brain, right? You've had to have heard the word before so you can put it together, and then that brings in a whole bunch of other things that we could talk about probably for hours, right, in terms of knowing the words and having some sort of knowledge of those words.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of the key idea is that, like we're always looking for like a reference in our you know the term I always found really challenging our mental lexicon, right, our personal dictionary of words. So one of the things that people do when they're reading a word is they're scanning their brain as they're pronouncing it. So you're like is there a word in my mental dictionary that works this way or similar to this? And this is really important. When you get to a word like a bow and you say a bow, you search your kind of mental, actually your personal dictionary, and say do I know a word like this? And you're like, oh, one that's really close, is about right. And so we have to, we make that adjustment because it's going, it's a slightly different pronunciation but it's close enough that when we have those skills of reading long words, it actually isn't that difficult for you. And it's also why phonological awareness is really essential, because with phonological awareness what we're doing is that allows us to make the wrong thing into the right thing, right.

Devin Kearns:

And the examples I like to give are things like the word cotton, right? So if you say the syllables in cotton, cot-ton, like the t sound is not in the word cotton. The sound is in the word cotton. It's a glottal, stop right. It's this other really random, like little sound, and so you need to make this mental manipulation to turn you know the sounds into that and that's what you know. Some readers find really easy and other readers find really hard.

Lori:

Okay, You're saying something Devin that when I was teaching second grade and at the end you know, when you're starting to get into those multisyllabic words or polysyllabic words in second grade or at the end of the year, I would have a word like that and I would not want to be teaching it wrong, Right. So there'd be like a word like cotton and I'm like oh, I don't, I don't know where to to. Even if I could take a good guess about where to break it syllable wise, I still wasn't quite sure how to say it because it didn't have those sounds, and so it was always really tricky as a teacher to try to figure this out.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, yeah. So I even get the example of like the word fan Right Like I. There's a time when I started to worry like should I even teach a word like fan, because F-A-N doesn't make fan. Like fan has a nasalized vowel right. That S is actually A-N. Sorry it sounds bad, but so that sound of the A has been shifted right Because it's next to a nasal sound, like the N sound.

Devin Kearns:

And so I for a time was like maybe I shouldn't teach these words for the same reason. I was like worried that I was like almost doing harm by being it's cotton and we have to turn it into cotton. And then what I realized later was actually that's exactly what I need kids to learn, that's exactly what I need to teach them because they need to do this mental manipulation right. There's always going to be this need to change the wrong thing into the right thing, and that's, I mean, that's how we have to do it, because we're trying to find that, you know, entry in our mental dictionary and this is what we do when we sort of encounter something that caught time. We've got to get kids to do that, and that's going to happen through a lot of practice.

Lori:

That's really helpful. I it actually feels great as a teacher to know that that's what we want them to do. We want them to see it, have a recognition, and then be like oh, cot ton is not a word that I'm familiar, oh, it's cotton. Oh, okay, now that sound can be whatever. I don't even know what you said. It was Okay. So I want to talk a little bit more about you know, something that I think might be considered controversial. We've we've, you know, heard you talk about it before, um, but I think it's really important because it's something I've always been a little bit skeptical about, um.

Lori:

When I uh was in Baltimore city, we had to get trained, um for a program that had students identify syllable division rules, right, so closed syllables, open syllables, and they had to like, mark up these words a whole lot. And again, maybe I'm like sounding very type A on this podcast today, but I was very nervous that I was going to teach them incorrectly because I had not learned these rules. So it was all new to me. I was learning them, um, and they were requiring the position that I was in in in the city to become a trainer.

Lori:

So I'm like, oh my God, now, not only do I have to teach students and like teach these lessons and practice, but I also have to teach teachers, um, but the thing that I struggled with was I wasn't sure if these, you know, these division rules were actually helpful for students to be able to read. It felt like a lot of mental load, like cognitive load, to be able to do all this stuff to the word rather than just like actually attack it and read it. But I know, like you've shared that in the research that you've done, the rules aren't consistent and there are a lot of exceptions, and so I think that also added to, you know, the apprehension that I was feeling. So I'm wondering if you can share about what your research found about like the consistency or inconsistency of the syllable division rules.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, definitely. So the study that I did was actually an analysis of words, not of kids, and so what I did was to look at like over 10,000 English words that were common in grades one through five, and I found words that had either the VCCV pattern or the VCV pattern. And for those who don't know what I'm talking about, I mean, so you know, everyone here is a literacy person, but I'll just say it for people who are less literacy, you know, familiar, maybe don't know about these, so anyway. So the VCCV means vowel, constant, constant vowel, a word like rabbit, a-b-b-i, and a vowel constant vowel word is a word like tiger, i-g-e, and you can also have V? V like lion, I O, right, so, but let's not focus on that one for now. We'll focus on the other ones.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so, and like you, like being really like wanting to do it the right way and also like when someone explained to me that there's a pattern here, I was like super excited because, like I didn't think there was a pattern, right. So someone explained to me, when you have a VCV pattern, if you break the word into parts and you end the first vowel, the first syllable of the vowel, that vowel says the long sound, right, it says I, and so then students can know that's tie. And then ger and you put it together and make tiger. And I was like so excited because I felt like before that I didn't have like a way to give kids access to that kind of thing and so I felt like this immediate sort of like excitement about it. But, like you, I was worried that I started to like wonder like does this work all the time?

Devin Kearns:

Cause you think about words like you know, linen or something, and dragon, and it's like those don't work right, like you have the VCV pattern, but in linen that I says the short sound and dragon the A says the short sound, I started to wonder, like how good is this? And so when I did the analysis, basically what I found is that for two syllable words right, just words of two syllables. Just often when we teach kids with these two-syllable words, right, just words with two syllables, just often when we teach kids with these. And it works about half the time with E. So, in other words, half the words that have the E sound have the long sound when they have the VCV pattern and half the words have the short sound when they have the VCV pattern. Right, and that's not accounting for the schwa sound, which, for E, is actually the majority.

Devin Kearns:

Okay, so we're just talking about the long and the short, forgetting about that. And so for the other vowels it's better, like A is pretty good and I is pretty good, o is very good, o is the best one, and then you know you and Y are okay and so, but they're not very frequent and so. So basically, what I concluded is and so that was two syllable words right. When you get past that, it's really bad, right? So?

Devin Kearns:

these are things are like working like less than a third of the time, uh, because, uh, when you account for the schwa sound, because there are so many of those, and that made me think, if we're going to teach kids something about how to break words into parts, maybe this is not exactly the best use of time, for the reason you also said, which is it's a lot of. There's a lot of cognitive effort that goes into pronouncing, like you know, doing this work right, because we will teach kids, like this pattern is VCV, you divide it after the V. You need a way to remember that. So you mark it up, you mark the Vs's, you draw the line, and then we teach kids like the macron, right, the little line across the top that says it's a long sound, or the bread which looks like the smiley face, and you know, and you teach kids like those, you might not say the names, but you teach them that, like those are associated with those sounds, so kids will remember it and so that you know.

Devin Kearns:

So I just started to realize, like, in addition to the fact that these aren, and so that you know. So I just started to realize, like, in addition to the fact that these aren't that consistent, that's a lot of yes, cognitive load for kids, and that's even when they're just reading one word. What do you do when you're like in print, right You're? You know it's hard to be like let me stop, let me go over here on a little worksheet and like write it out and then come back Right and you could do that but that's not necessarily going to get you where you need to go.

Devin Kearns:

At least that is the theory. I will say that the VCCV rule is much more consistent, so, and that one does work a little better even for longer words. We don't have as many of those as longer words. Right, we start to get rid of those, those doubles a lot of times in the longer words. But when you have that you can rely on that. First one usually say the short sound or the schwa sound, but it does say the short sound a lot. But you know a lot of. You know we would teach kids is we're teaching them that VCV because we need them to realize when that single letter vowel makes the long sound, because that's not what they expect.

Melissa:

So interesting and you made me think when you were talking about the VCV specifically. What like? If it works, you know, majority of the time for a lot of the vowels but not so much for E but for a lot of them it kind of works. But then when you get past the two syllable words, it's almost like it works for them for a little bit when they are just moving up from one syllable to two syllable, but then it kind of probably all falls apart after that.

Devin Kearns:

It falls apart, right, yeah, and I think that's the tricky thing about it, right, is like. So if you have this sort of space where they don't work that well and you know for the longer words, and there's this massive cognitive load, like you start to worry. Like you know what's, what are we doing to the kids, I started to worry this is like heresy to say this, but like I started to worry. It's as bad as like the guessing strategy in terms of time, right, so, like with the like, you know, when I didn't know about how to teach reading, like I'd have kids, like for 25 seconds, try to figure it out and use their strategies, right, and like the kids would sometimes be silent because they don't know what to do.

Devin Kearns:

And so, and they're, they're trying to work through this, like a list of nine strategies or whatever they're using, you know, the the little animals kind of strategies or whatever, right, um, and so they, you know they're in that same kind of cognitive space of like taking themselves entirely out of the word doing something. You know, that's like this extra kind of exercise and then coming back to the word, and that's the worry we all had about, like the context-based strategies and the guessing you know, and using these strategies that we were not focusing enough on. You know actual reading. We were taking them out of that and I worried a little bit. This is going to be a problem here too. Yeah, and I worried a little bit.

Lori:

This is going to be a problem here too. Yeah, and there's so much like energy that goes into breaking it all apart or I don't even know what to call it, like dividing the syllables and thinking about the rules and then doing all the things that by the time you actually get to the part where you sound out the word, I feel like you've done so much at that point that I just don't I wonder about the efficacy of using those strategies to do that. And that's where you know I kind of broke down, so I appreciate you explaining like oh, you know that there are, you know, some hesitancies around that, for good reason, with the word. So I appreciate that.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, yeah. So I appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, you know, and it makes me think too that when I was, when we did a paper on this for the readingly journal, my colleagues and I we were looking at even for the CCV rule, there were like one of these programs has like six backup strategies, because sometimes you have like a CK Right, you have like it's like well, now you can't divide it between the C and the k because that's a digraph and they had all these kind of like backup things.

Devin Kearns:

So it's like you have that cognitive load on top of everything else and it just it feels like a lot and maybe it's not a good use of time, but but you know, but the so all that like this is the worst thing that I have to talk about, or like talk about because, like people hate when I say that so much and you know, you know, and so I won't, if you don't mind, I want to say a couple of things about that. For people who are like already, like this is the worst podcast episode.

Lori:

No, I mean, I think it's important to talk about it and also then kind of be like hey, like we're talking about this because it's important, right, Because research is kind of showing it. So I appreciate you extending your, uh, your thoughts here.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, okay, well, good, well, I appreciate that, you appreciate it. So. So I think that you know there are programs that include syllable division that have evidence of efficacy, meaning that if you look at studies of those programs, they have positive effects, and I'm certain that many teachers have used those strategies with kids and kids have profited from those strategies and it has helped their literacy, right. I have no doubt that that's true, because it's something that does work sometimes. But what I also say is that there are know if you did sort of a different type of strategy or taught about syllables in a different way because I'm not saying don't teach about syllables, let's be really clear.

Devin Kearns:

I'm not saying we should just guess, but if I taught this in a different way, could I get at least the same results or maybe better ones, right? So it's not about saying that this is terrible, but that's not. My endeavor here is to say that we shouldn't do anything or anything like that. I believe in evidence and you know, and when we think about actual studies of student behavior, student performance, what we find is that programs that use them have positive effects and programs that don't have positive effects, that don't have positive effects, right, and so it's not possible to say this is a totally bad idea, but it's not supported by the idea that when you look at words, kids are going to encounter that it's going to work. And then there's this cognitive overhead piece and there's never been a study that showed that, like specifically doing syllable division has like really positive effects compared to using a different strategy.

Melissa:

Yeah, I'm really glad you said that. That's exactly what I was going to ask you next, because I you know that programs have it, have syllable types and syllable division, but also I mean standards. Do curriculum evaluation tools do right? It is really embedded within our literacy world. So it'd be really, it would be really tough for people to hear you say stop teaching syllables altogether.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so you know when we're talking about reading the polysyllabic or multisyllabic words. I want to be really clear that you can use good strategies for doing that, and there are a couple of things that are effective that acknowledge the importance of patterns inside syllables. That, for example, it's true that a single letter vowel make the long sound or the short sound and sometimes the schwa, but it's useful to teach students about that idea because they will encounter a lot of words like that. You know the majority of words have one or those two sounds right, and so it is really important to teach something about that. It's just that question like, how much do we teach about the actual division of the word using these particular rules? And so, yeah, so it's.

Devin Kearns:

I'm not saying don't teach anything about syllables. It's also true that, like you know, it is in standards because, though a lot of those like came along at the time that I still use them and like taught them and like included them in programs because, you know that was new to me and also seemed really logical. Like you know, I saw words for the first time and there were, you know, programs that had evidence, effectiveness, that you know. Like people thought like we should put this into these standards, right, and so. So I like, I acknowledge that and, you know, I think it would be good if it were saying something about like a syllable based strategy and not necessarily like syllable division. But you know, like it is what it is.

Melissa:

And I wonder too, if it's more like you've got me thinking about this idea of just the language shifting slightly, to like this idea of a rule that when I say a rule, that makes me feel like it can't be broken right, like it's something that will always happen. So when you're talking about the, you know the long vowels and the short vowels and in the different syllables, like it's always the same, but it's not always the same. So maybe it's just a shift in like. I think you use the word pattern, right, like maybe it's less of a rule, more of a pattern, something that you see and you're what did you? You refer to the English language as quasi-regular. Is that right? Is that the right word?

Devin Kearns:

It is yes, yeah, mark Seidenberg likes that word too. Yeah, yeah, so right, I mean, that's the thing. So English, listen, you've got English has. One of our colleagues, charles Perfetti, says like exemplary regularities is the term that he uses Like a lot of things do work, okay, but English does make it a little harder than other languages. Like I don't know if other folks have talked about this on the podcast, but you know they've done studies to show, like by the end of first grade, what percentage of words in a language kids in English versus other languages can read in Europe. Did you guys? Has anyone talked about that no, please do.

Devin Kearns:

Okay, so so they did this analysis. They took 13 European languages and they like said, like how, what percentage of words in the language can the kids read? They're in the first grade level, right? So like Greek and Turkish are like the highest, like 93% or something of real words and about the same nonsense words. You want to guess where English was on the list of 13?

Lori:

Oh my gosh. Um, I'm going to say 30%.

Devin Kearns:

Oh, so yes, yes, so correct and correct.

Lori:

Right, okay, well, you wanted me to guess and if I was thinking, I was already 13.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so it was 30% percent.

Lori:

Was that really? Yeah, that's right. Wow, yeah, isn't that crazy. So I promise I didn't Google it. Yeah, I promise. Yeah, it's crazy.

Devin Kearns:

It's crazy, Right so?

Devin Kearns:

you know, so English does make it a little harder than other languages because the, for a lot of historical reasons, we borrowed spellings and all this kind of thing. So you know that makes your the work a little bit harder for students. But there are still these exemplary regularities in the system that we can help students use to, you know, build their understanding. When they don't have something to, you know hang there, you know sort of to get them started. And that's actually the reason that, like, if you're going to use syllable division, I like get it in the sense that it gives you some hooks to hang on right. So it's like I've got something.

Devin Kearns:

It might give me the wrong answer, I might say tigger or whatever, it might say dragon or something, but it gives me something that I can use because otherwise, particularly poor readers, like kids with reading difficulty, they don't know anything, so they the only thing they know how to do is guess, and if you give them some tool, that tool might turn on the right thing. So that's why, like, I get the instinct to do syllable division. That's why I did it and I did see kids improve because they did have some hooks, you know like to to help them. So so I think you know. That's why it's. You know there is some value. But again, like, the data don't always support the things that we like, and so we have to follow the research and do the things that are good.

Lori:

Okay, so we're on board, we're here with you in patterns over rules. Melissa and I are in, and I'm sure a lot of listeners are wondering too, then, like what should, what should we do then to teach multisyllabic, polysyllabic words? And I, I'd love to give you like a quick uh something to react to. That happened in my own house in the last couple of days. Okay, so I have.

Lori:

Now this is like semi embarrassing because I feel I feel like she should know this word and I don't know what happened, but so I'll just say that, um, the word, so this, this word, came up and I and she said, um, alexa told us that we had a notification, and I said a notification, what? Okay, so that doesn't sound right to me. Does it sound right to you? She's like no, not totally. I'm like what you? She's like no, not totally. I'm like what part? She's like the, the, not part. I'm like okay, what in that part? She's like oh, okay, can you say it differently?

Lori:

And we finally got to notification very quickly. But I mean, first of all, I was stunned. I use that word all the time, you know. I mean just in everyday life we use that word now, but when she said it I kind of laughed. I thought she was kidding. But I mean quickly we kind of like drilled down into the quote part that was, and I didn't think it was a particularly tricky part. So maybe we could talk through that and then you could use that as like a springboard for some other strategies to do, because then I can put them in my toolbox for the next time something comes up.

Devin Kearns:

Okay, fabulous, so all right. So notification is a good way. It's hard because it's long, but let's just what we're gonna do it.

Lori:

So I figured you're in the polymultisyllabic part here.

Devin Kearns:

So I know I went all in on that. So, like you get to do the hard words right. So okay, so first, so the strategy I recommend is a combination of, like, a morpheme strategy and a soul strategy. So the morpheme part of it is where you find meaning parts in the words that are typically two, three, four letters, and you use that to get you started. And you find those affixes and you circle them and one of my colleagues, maureen Lovett she, you know, turned the strategy peeling off. So you peel those off of the base word right, or, if it's not a word, you take them off of what's left, and that's great because it reduces the size of the problem and for a lot of students and morphology teaching about morphemes has awesome effects for both reading words and for understanding the meaning of words. It's really a great thing to do. So once you peel off the affix, then you're left with the rest of the deal. So, notification we've got the shun.

Devin Kearns:

Now, as you know, and I know, shun is not the actual morpheme. I want to be clear for listeners ION is the morpheme, but shun is the common way that we use it. The t, you know, says sh or whatever. The t-i says sh. So you know. So I get this not exactly, but that pattern is so common. So you give kids these larger patterns like shun. We give the kid the you know, your daughter, the shun.

Devin Kearns:

And now we have notific right this is the hard part is like it's got a lot of pieces right, so, but let's do it, okay. So the first thing is so. The next thing is, now that we have that part off, we're going to break it into parts, and the way that we do that is we find the vowels and we mark them. So you can mark them, we can put a little check mark under them, okay, and this is kind of the learning strategy. Eventually you get rid of that, but what that does is it tells you how many parts you're going to have, because every syllable has at least one vowel, right, and that's a strategy developed by this researcher at Rowan O'Connor, where she basically studied this and found that this strategy was really effective. And the first thing you do is to find every syllable has at least one vowel, meaning that, like EA, those are two vowels that go together, even the vowel constant E, two vowels in a syllable. So you find the parts that you're going to use, right, so a notification, not-i-fi-ca-y. So we're going to be four vowels that we're going to work with, and then we're going to figure out what each of the parts says, breaking it so that every part only has one vowel. Okay, so, and this is where, like what we would do for syllable division, might differ compared to what I'm going to suggest. So the next thing then is to figure out, like, what do we do to break the word into parts? And this is where your daughter's you know, her mental way of doing this is a little bit different than the way that we want. You know, we don't we want kids to do right. But I love that example because it's just, it's so great, so it's a great example of kids do all the time. So when you do this, we're going to break it into parts and this, when I do this, I'm like, actually I'm showing you a little card in my brain, like, think of a little index card and you're covering, like the you know the first part, right? And for listeners, I'm just holding up my hand in the air without a piece of paper, anyway. So you set it up so that the index card covers part of the word, so that the first part only has one vowel, and so there are two ways that that could work. It could be N-O-T, right, which is what your daughter was thinking. You know, sort of in theory, right. And there's N-O-T, right, which is what your daughter was thinking, you know, sort of in theory, right, and there's N-O, so it could be either one of those, right, and this is the teaching part, not the part where she was just kind of figuring it out. But so for the teaching part we say it could be either one, and at this point we don't need to have a rule, so it doesn't actually matter in a way which one we use. It could be no, it could be not.

Devin Kearns:

What students do need to understand is that when you have a vowel at the end of a syllable, it says the long sound. If it's not at the end of the syllable, it's the beginning or middle. It says the short sound. That idea is essential. So that's where we talk about like open and closed syllables. Right, that idea is really critical. I don't call them open and closed syllables. I typically call them long vowel syllables and short vowel syllables. This is like also heresy people, right, this is like the worst thing ever. But what I realized is that like, well, open and closed doesn't mean anything to anybody, right? And then this is important like it causes people to do things like the syllable house. Do you guys know the syllable house?

Lori:

I've seen it. I was going to ask you about it, so bring it up. Yes, okay.

Devin Kearns:

So the syllable house is this idea like, what you do is you make a little house, right, and what you do is you can put a word like hen in it, right, h-e-n, right, and you go H-E, and then there's a door and the N is on the door, okay. So when the door is closed, okay, the N is at the end, the door is closed, okay. So the vowel can't go outside and say its name okay, it's closed, the door is closed, it's closed. In. When the door is closed, it says the short sound. So hen door is closed, says the, the s sound, the short sound. Then you open the door because the n was on the door and now the e is at the end of the syllable, okay, and now, because the door is open, you can it, says he okay, and that doesn't work.

Devin Kearns:

All the time, though it doesn't okay but the the thing about it is it's not so much whether it works, it's that it. The only purpose of that is to get kids to remember that that pattern is called open or closed. That's what the door is for, because the kids are trying to try and get kids understand that, like, when it's open it says the long sound, when it's closed it says the short sound. So what that means is, like the syllable houses, like this one level removed from what we're trying to teach kids, which is, like you know, the long, there's a long sound, the short sound. But because teachers like well, I need kids to know what an open and closed syllable is, let me me do this other thing to understand what open and closed syllables is. So now we're like two steps away from what we want kids to know, which is that, like, at the end it says the long sound, in the middle it says the short sound.

Melissa:

And it's asking them to remember another thing that they don't really necessarily need to remember.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, like the term open and closed is like, I mean, it has a linguistic base, like there's a whole thing about the linguistics of that. But, like you know, kids don't need to be linguist, right? So I started calling them long vowel syllables and short vowel syllables, which has its own challenges because, like you can say, like, well, ea, like, is a long vowel, right. But I thought, well, it's a, you know, it's a useful way to think of it, and so I just thought this is easier. And I don't have data on this except that, like, teachers tell me this works and have sent me emails saying, like I had a student that this really helped them. So anyway, so we call them long vowel syllables and short vowel syllables. People call them open and closed syllables. I don't really have a quarrel with that as long as you don't teach the syllable house. So I don't think it's necessary, but just don't try to get the kids to remember that by doing a separate thing. So then, once we have that idea, the vowels at the end says the long sound In notification. If we cover it so that the T is covered, n-o says no, and we know that. Because of vowels at the end, n-o says no, and we know that because of vowels at the end OK, and so that goes along with.

Devin Kearns:

It's very similar to the syllable division strategy in that we're breaking words into parts and we're using our knowledge that vowels in different locations make different sounds. The difference is we don't have a rule, because you know, a student could just as easily put the card after the T and say not OK, and so that's where, like you, don't have to have a rule to do it. So and this is this is actually great Notification is a great example too, because you have no Okay, and then you have TIFF. Now, technically, because it has one F, it should be tie, it's not no, tie, it's no to or no to, it's actually a schwa. But notification, right.

Devin Kearns:

Some of them have the long sound, some of them have the short sound. So if you're going to divide up this really long word which I would not for teaching purposes probably it's fine. For our example, it's going to have places where the long sound is the right one and the short sound is the right one. But if we don't have a rule, if we just say, we're going to break it. So every syllable has one vowel, we can figure out what those vowels are and put it together. And that last piece is exactly what you very quickly held your daughter in your sandwich is like, hmm, you don't know a word. That's like that's not a word that you know, and that's really cool that you figured out, like where it was, like what's a word like that that you know? And she's like, oh, notification, because yeah, like you said, like this is in the ether now, like you know, we're getting notifications like all the time.

Lori:

Every second of every day, right, I mean, yeah, I was. I honestly that was. I feel like that's um a good example, cause I was shocked to add all those other things into it. I was like you have heard this word so often, I've said it, I don't, I don't, I guess she hadn't said it before, but we've said it, we've, we've talked. It just felt like so crazy to me, you know, as, like a mom and a teacher, like oh my gosh, this word that I've been using, we didn't know, like maybe I need to do better.

Devin Kearns:

You do not need to do better. I am certain that, like she is getting the best literacy environment ever. No, but I think it's a really cool example because also she knew what it was right.

Lori:

Totally yeah, she could explain what. Well and okay, so here's another thought. So after that I said so what other words are similar to it?

Lori:

Just to kind of throw some something else out there, cause you know, cause you're a teacher when you're a teacher you like to do that and she's like oh, okay, so notebook, notorious, but she was giving me all you know, all those kinds of ones with the different, and none of them held any like. None of them were super similar to notification, other than maybe like notify Right, Like I cause I wrote down the ones that she gave me, but they did all have that O sound.

Melissa:

So once she was able to identify, then we went on and that's funny, lori, because I was wondering if she was almost kind of doing that peeling off that. You mentioned, devin with the word not at the beginning, because she just saw this big word and she was like, well, I know, not right, because now that you're saying that I'm wondering if her brain stuck on. Okay, what other words are n-o-t? But say, note you know right, right.

Lori:

Well, I mean we'll not know, because we lost uh interest in that.

Melissa:

I'm sure she did, but you didn't.

Lori:

I didn't. I'm still thinking about it. Yeah, that's pretty cool though yeah, I so I

Devin Kearns:

just people might find this amusing for themselves. And, um, it's like you know, this happens all the time as adults, because we read words in our brains. We don't read them out loud, and so you end up with like this, like mental, like representation of the pronunciation of a word and you know exactly what it means, but it turns out it's not right, okay. And so then you have this moment when you're like in like 10th grade and you like say it out loud and people are like what are you saying? Uh, do you guys know? Do you have an example of this for yourself? Like the word that you said out loud and you like totally got it wrong well, we always give our hermione example which is a name.

Lori:

It's a name, so it's different than a word. We always say we always.

Melissa:

we both said Hermione in our heads until we heard it out loud and we're like what?

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, it's perfect, right. So it's like, but you knew exactly who she was, you knew everything about her. You just like didn't know the right pronunciation.

Lori:

Yeah, I feel like Devin an example might be like I remember as a, maybe like a teenager. Or saying the word debris out loud, but saying debris, debris, right, who knows why.

Devin Kearns:

Because there's no reason for it not to be right, because you knew what it was, you've read about it in some textbook or whatever, and like it might as well be right. It just isn't right, and so you know. And so I think that's you know. I mean it's still part of that same thing of like we need to figure it out, but I love that's. I mean it's still part of that same thing of like we need to figure it out.

Devin Kearns:

But I love that kind of thinking because it is true that the two things we do so we said that the one thing you do is you're always looking for some combination of your strategies and maybe you know, you just kind of you bring it up, however, and you just, and you end up thinking it's Debris, because I mean it might as well be right, cause there's no reason for it not to be. And what's cool, is you actually developed like a mental anchor for what that meant Right? It just, you know, is it's not what people actually say in the real word. Like you know, I thought like Yosemite, I thought Yosemite was the correct pronunciation.

Melissa:

Like yeah right.

Devin Kearns:

You hear about Yosemite and then you read Yosemite, you don't realize they're even the same thing, right? It's like two different national parks.

Lori:

Which is making me think so much about the power of teachers and why it's so important to develop that oral language right. I mean just like, even I mean and also show the words as we're developing that language, like, for example, debris or Yosemite, like just showing that word is going to make that connection for our students, or notification.

Devin Kearns:

Yes.

Melissa:

Yeah, and we always think about the oral language in terms of meaning and vocabulary and you know, oh, that's on the language comprehension side of things. But you know, to bring it over here into, even when they're decoding the word, you know they can. It can really help them if they've heard the word before.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, I actually recommend to that point that, like teachers actually tell students like out loud the words that they're going to be practicing in the lesson, so they hear them out loud, right? So especially if they're words that are less familiar to the kids, right? And I really want to be clear If it's a really rare word, it's not really a word, it might as well be a nonsense word. I had a program I taught one time where they had hobnob on the list of real words and they also had Pipkin, and if you know what a Pipkin is, I'll be really impressed.

Melissa:

Um, I do because you used it in your article. Yes, oh yeah, but I don't even remember what it is. Still, it's a.

Devin Kearns:

It's an earthenware cooking vessel. I think we're in the middle ages. Yeah, um, yeah. So you know, don't teach the real words, but if they're less familiar to students, there's nothing wrong with saying listen to this word, say it out loud with me, because it's critical kids have the correct pronunciation of the words, and you know a lot of students with reading difficulty. If you ask them to say the words, they won't even say them correctly, and so it's impossible actually to get the right answer. If you think crocodile is pronounced doco-cryo, right? So we need to get students to pronounce the words first when we're teaching a lesson. So I recommend that a lot of times if you're teaching words that might be less familiar to students, or just to confirm, like it's crocodile, let's all say it together. Crocodile, say it slowly, and so on.

Melissa:

Yeah, so I wanted to tell you you've talked a little bit about this. We've talked to other people on the podcast about set for variability you didn't use those words, but you've kind of talked about it which is that idea of being flexible and trying out different pronunciations, especially with the vowels sounds. What does that from your lens? What does that actually look like in a classroom? Like, what can a teacher do to help students with that?

Devin Kearns:

actually look like in a classroom, like what can a teacher do to help students with that? Yeah, so the answer is I don't know. So, so this is like. This is also what happens when you're like a science person is like a lot of times like I cannot tell you.

Devin Kearns:

I can tell you what I think but I don't know if there's data on that Right. So yeah, we don't. There's not. There've been a couple of studies where people have taught students a strategy where they'll say a word out loud and they'll say it incorrectly, and they ask students to tell them what the word actually is. So they'll say like shallder rather than shoulder, and they'll have students tell them what the right word is right.

Devin Kearns:

And I did that in a program that we developed, and we found that the program we developed had okay effects, but I did not think that the effects could be attributed specifically to that activity, and so the data are pretty unclear whether that actually works. And the study that I'm describing is with kindergarten students and they got small effects for that, but it was on a very small set of words, and so I'm not convinced that that necessarily is the right thing to do. So I'm so, let's be clear teaching students like mispronounced words and having them correct those is is a really is a good idea. So, because the idea set for variability is that when we talked about which is like we make the wrong thing, the right thing right, and the set is basically the idea of like I'm set up mentally for the idea that it's going to be variable, right, so I recognize ahead of time it's going. I always found that confusing, like what is the?

Lori:

what is?

Devin Kearns:

why is it called this? I still love it. I tried to call it something else in a paper one time, but it didn't catch on. Um, so so set for variability. It's like it's not. You know it's anyway. So the term set for variability basically means I'm ready for it not to be the correct thing. And so the thing that I think we should do because I don't think we should teach kids like mispronounced words is literally to do what we already talked about, which is to teach kids to be flexible so that when they sound something out, they know the correct answer. And it gets to that point of using words deliberately where it might not quite work right, Not early on, right, so you know, when you do a word that has like the, you don't use cotton right at the beginning, maybe right, Not in the first lesson, but like, but you want to quickly and strategically build in words where it's not perfect, right, when it does sound a little bit different, because we want students to get used to that idea of being flexible. So really, the idea of being flexible is the best way to teach kids set variability. So you know, some of my colleagues at Florida State have like talked about, they've been studying how to do that and they don't have results. I don't know what the results are from those studies they just finished them, like last year, but do that. You know, and I think it's also good to remember.

Devin Kearns:

Phonological awareness is literally. This is why phonological awareness is important, because it's not about sounds and isolation, it's about locating that mental entry in your brain. That is, you associate the pronunciation, you associate with the written pattern. That's why phonological awareness is so critical. So you know even early on, when you're teaching kids like phonological awareness and you're segmenting and blending, that's helpful because it gets students to like put those sounds together, take them apart, so they understand. When they're putting them together particularly, they are getting this idea that they come together and they might sound a little off and then you turn them into the right thing. If you do f-a-n it's fan, not fan, it's not fan right. That's really useful to get kids to do that. So that's key.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's really helpful and I know we've heard a few times where people say that that sounds like we're just asking kids to guess at what the word is. But I, you know, what I just heard you say is like you know a word can, or even you know a letter or groups of letters can have you know a few different ways to pronounce it. So let them be flexible within those. So it's not just take a stab at what you think this word is altogether, but like, okay, like, just you know, be open to trying different sounds out. That are all sounds that these letters can make.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, and that's the key part where we get out of guessing, cause it's like it's not that we're not telling you the thing we're telling you. It could be the long sound, it could be the short sound, right? So it's not like there's this huge universe of things that it can be and that alone is really helpful for students. So it's not like kids see EA and we've never taught them that EA says eh. Right, like we teach them that EA sometimes says eh, and then we use that flexibility to get us the rest of the way there.

Lori:

Yeah, yeah Well, and that's what we do as adults, that's what we do when we read bigger words. I think if we try to pigeonhole kids into like, quote the rules, as we said, the rules just, you know, don't always work and those pattern-seeking our brains are pattern-seeking machines, seeking our brains are pattern seeking machines. So we want to try to see like, oh okay, if it's, is there another way to say this that also makes sense perhaps in other contexts, kind of freeing, liberation, you know.

Devin Kearns:

Like, your daughter is another great example of that Like, and what you asked her to do is a really great idea because you asked her to find other examples to sort of like, reinforce that idea. That, like, when you see this, it says that right, because that's what we're trying to get kids to do is get their brains to pick up on the patterns in the language. Right, it's never, you know, it's quasi regular. But there are things like, you know, notification, and you know I can't remember the other words that you had her said. She said but yeah, exactly that.

Melissa:

Well, you mentioned morphology, but I just wanted to like circle back to make sure we touched on how important morphology is in reading multisyllabic words. Is there anything else you wanted to say about morphology?

Devin Kearns:

No, the only thing I would add is that you need to give students like a bank of affixes. So you know, you can't just be like find the parts right. You need to tell them what the parts are right. And I actually watched a lesson recently like that. I was surprised like they actually did have the kids kind of like figure it out. Like it's like here are words with ION and like what do you think it says? I'm not a big fan of? Like what do you think it says I'm a big fan of? Like TION says shun. What does it say? Shun, right? I do mention a little bit about what it means. Like you know, say like the act of or whatever it means when you're doing something is the way I usually explain it, right and so. But that's that's. I just do that. I focus on TION session. Let's read words with TION. So students need a bank of affixes that you teach them ahead of time, so when they go to peel off, they they know, you know those and there's no like perfect bank of them.

Melissa:

Just find a you know decent list of them and that can start pretty early in like kindergarten, first grade.

Devin Kearns:

Yes, so yeah, teaching kids like inflections, like, as you know, teaching them like inflections meaning, like I N G E D, teaching them those things like really early on, great data on that and then, like by end of first grade, second grade, bringing in more of the other affixes. So you know, third, fourth, fifth grade, they're going to do a lot more of that stuff and they're going to start using them a lot more for meaning and you know, getting into, like bicycle, you know the buy and the, you know cycle and so on.

Lori:

Really quickly. Just since we just talked about set for variability or being flexible, you say affixes. In my head I say affixes. Is it right? Wrong? What's going on?

Devin Kearns:

There's no correct.

Lori:

No difference?

Devin Kearns:

Okay, no, I mean listen, if we want to be all like technical about it, it's a short foul because it's you know it's VCCV, so affixes. You know it's it's bccv, so affix is possibly correct, but I don't know. Can I also just say this is my favorite thing. Do you know, like do you know, that basil is not pronounced basil in like the uk?

Lori:

basil. I just went last summer and they were saying basil and I felt like I was in a movie.

Devin Kearns:

It was great yeah, it's a great. It's a perfect example of this exact thing, right, where, like we, just we did it one way, they did it another way, we basically just divided it in a different like place. Essentially right. Do you know what they say for like process in Canada? Process, it's process.

Lori:

But we all still understand each other.

Devin Kearns:

They do, they do and we understand them too, because it's set for variability, because it's so close right, yeah and so. But I just love those examples because it's just like different linguistic concepts. We basically chose a different way to divide up the word essentially right and so you know. So I think it's a good example why flexibility is really important.

Lori:

Yes, so fun to think about too. You know, you're like nerdy when you're sitting here like and what other words are there right?

Devin Kearns:

Totally yeah, yeah.

Lori:

All right. So, devin, I feel like we're coming to a close here, but I'm wondering if there's anything else you'd like to say to a teacher listening who might feel stuck or unsure how to start, or like, oh my gosh, this is new information. I've been, you know, doing this one way and I want to try to shift, or I'm just wanting to learn how to think about it differently, so I'll leave it to you.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so I did. So I wrote an article, a couple of articles about this that people can email me for. One of them is like totally, you know I can, I can post online. I'm working on fixing my website, but and I can send it to you all the two of you too, because you guys can, you know, share things.

Lori:

Yeah, we can share things publicly. We can put all of this in the show notes if we have the links, okay.

Devin Kearns:

Yeah, so I'll send you the one. So there's. I think you can look at that article to get to give you some ideas about this Cause I am pretty specific about some of these, some of these things. That's one thing you can do. There are, like you know, videos online of you know, people explaining these kinds of things. I've done a couple of them so you could look for those as an example of what to do.

Devin Kearns:

So, you know, if you're not sure, like you know, you do want to learn about how these things work, right, and I, you know, and people ask me recently, like, if you have a program that does this, like, should I just like change it? And my answer was absolutely not, like, so so you've, like everybody else in the school is doing that I think the kids are better off if you don't try to change it, okay. So, like I don't want to say stay the course, exactly if you're using syllable division, but I don't want to say change it tomorrow unless you have that flexibility and if the kids haven't learned it already, don't change the game on them, like you know, right now. But I think you know, think about for next year, right, like, is there a way I could do this differently and, and you know, consider a different option, but you know, if you're doing something with the long word, you're on the right track and focus on more themes. If I was gonna say anything specifically.

Lori:

This was so fun to talk with you. You did not disappoint. Thank you for being awesome. This is great, like we could talk all day, but we're so grateful that you took some time to talk with us and just chatted out about these really important things that teachers are grappling with like every single day, and we're you know we're struggling with too, so thank you.

Devin Kearns:

Thank you guys day, and we're, you know we're struggling with too. So thank you, thank you guys. I mean you guys do so much great stuff for the field. Like, I think we're all better for the work that you do. So I don't know how many podcasts people will say like, thank you, not just for today, but in general for what you do. But let me, if they do, let me add to that. You know, um, thank you guys for the work that you do. It's really awesome that you help all of us.

Melissa:

Thank you. To stay connected with us, sign up for our email list at literacypodcastcom, join our Facebook group and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Lori:

If this episode resonated with you, take a moment to share with a teacher friend or leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

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.