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Making Words Stick with Molly Ness and Katie Pace MIles

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Episode 229

In this episode, Katie Pace Miles and Molly Ness define and explain orthographic mapping as a crucial cognitive process for reading fluency and comprehension. They discuss the importance of mapping words in long-term memory, the difference between memorization and mapping, and the trifecta of phonology, orthography, and meaning that supports effective word learning. 

They share a four-step protocol from their new book, Making Words, Stick, for supporting orthographic mapping. They provide insights into effective teaching strategies and resources available for educators.

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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:

Ever notice how some students are still sounding out every word, while others are breezing through text? If you're wondering how to help students move from slow, effortful decoding to automatic word reading, this episode is for you.

Melissa:

In this episode you'll hear from Katie Pace-Miles and Molly Ness. They are researchers and authors of the new book Making Words Stick. They share a simple four-step routine that supports orthographic mapping to help your students read words automatically.

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. Hi, katie and Molly, we are so excited to have both of you back again on the podcast together this time. Thanks for having us, and we're super excited about your new book, making Words Stick. It's in our Science of Reading and Practice series from Scholastic and we know it's going to be super popular.

Lori:

We know it's going to be a big hit. Yeah, we can't wait, so I'm going to kick us off. Just jump right in. In your book you say the goal for students is for all words to become sight words, and the way to make this happen is through orthographic mapping. So we thought the best way to start this would be for you to share what orthographic mapping is, for you just to tell us all about it so I can see Molly on my left. I'm going to pass it to Molly and then, molly, you can send it off to Katie.

Molly Ness:

Well, I'm going to let Katie define orthographic mapping, but I'll set the stage a little bit. Why do we care about orthographic mapping? We care about it because it's really the on-ramp to fluency and comprehension. If you were to think about all of the words that you encounter in your everyday life as an adult reader street signs, newspaper articles, anything that you read you rarely decode anything. Every word that you likely read, with the exception of a couple proper nouns, know proper nouns or sort of oddball words they've already been orthographically mapped. You instantly recognize them, and because you instantly recognize them, you have more cognitive energy to get to comprehension, which is of course, the ultimate goal for for reading. We know that proficient adult readers have about 50,000 words that have been orthographically mapped, and so I'm sort of dancing around the definition. So I'll let Katie handle the actual definition of orthographic mapping. She had the pleasure of literally learning from the researcher who wrote about orthographic mapping, so this is definitely in Katie's wheelhouse.

Katie Pace Miles:

Thanks, molly. Yes, the definition of orthographic mapping. It's a theory of Dr Linnea Aries and she was my mentor for my PhD work, and the theory is based on decades of research that Linnea and her colleagues conducted on how students store words in memory. So the simplest way to put forth the definition is that it's a cognitive process of mapping the spelling, pronunciation and meaning of a word into long-term memory. And so that does speak to this goal that all words the goal would be that all words are stored in long-term memory so that when you see the word you're able to say it automatically. There's a lot that goes behind the scenes of getting that word into long-term memory. It's not instantaneous that the word is stored. You have to go through this cognitive process over time and it may take multiple exposures to the words or different uses of the words or activities that you do with the words in order to get it into long-term memory.

Molly Ness:

And what we mean by cognitive process is we want to be really clear that it's sort of this behind the scenes thing that happens within the brain. It's not something that you know. You would say to a classroom of kids pull out your orthographic mapping workbooks or it's this you know process that you teach. It's this sort of invisible, cognitive, behind the scenes thing that we all do as readers. And I think one of the misconceptions also about orthographic mapping is that it only is relevant to beginning readers, and certainly beginning readers are living in the world of orthographic mapping way more than proficient readers are.

Molly Ness:

But just this past summer I was reading a murder mystery book, not a familiar word to me. I could decode it. There was enough of the context of the word to know it, but I didn't know its pronunciation, and so I went on to the dictionary an online dictionary its meaning, how it looked, or its visual representation, and then its phonology, its sound structure. That word was then orthographically mapped for me so that anytime I came to that word in that same murder mystery book, it was instantly recognized. So I'm a proficient reader. It took one iteration of that word to be mapped, but we know that many children need multiple exposures to words before they're orthographically mapped. And it's not just the quantity of exposures, it's also the quality of exposures that matters to help kids map words.

Lori:

That's so interesting. I love that idea of quality and quantity, and I'm hearing you say it's different for everyone. Right? Everyone has a different experience with orthographic mapping. I'm curious if you might be able to share with our listeners why it's not memorizing words, right, if every adult has a lot of words orthographically mapped, how's it different than memorizing words?

Katie Pace Miles:

Memorizing often becomes a thing in education where it's a quick fix.

Katie Pace Miles:

Memorization becomes something that we do as students, in some sort of format where we don't draw attention to the orthographic representation of the word. And I can't speak for all teachers, but how I have seen it, how I used to do it before I actually learned about orthographic mapping, is you can think of it with word list reading or flashcard reading and we would ask students to memorize this whole word as a unit. And what's difficult for teachers to understand is that that is what it looks like when you become a proficient reader. When you are proficient, you are able to look at a word and say the word, but in order to get to that point, you have to do something with the word. Or I can even temper that and say, overwhelmingly, students need to do something with that word. Or I can even temper that and say overwhelmingly, students need to do something with that word. There are students for whom they can look at a word and it becomes mapped in long term memory. Those students are the exception to the rest.

Molly Ness:

And I'll just add that, as we can speak from our own classroom experience, memorization doesn't necessarily lead to transfer. So I had this experience when I was a classroom teacher. I would teach spelling or I would teach sight words through flashcards and kids would get it on the flashcard and then they would see it in the text and you'd be like come on, you just got how does it not make, how does it not stick? And that we know is that memorization doesn't necessarily lead to transfer.

Katie Pace Miles:

And one other thing, too is I work overwhelmingly with striving readers, and we know from research striving readers need more exposures to the words, and anyone who works with striving readers knows that intuitively. But what research has shown is no. In fact, even when you look at populations of first grade striving readers, they can actually be stratified into students who are at more or less risk within that striver reading range, and the students most at risk need even more exposures, and so, also, you have to consider for these students level of engagement. That's something Molly and I take very seriously in our work too is where's the fun in this? How do we get striving readers to want to do word work, word analysis, routines that help them get these words into long-term memory, because they need so many more exposures?

Melissa:

Yeah, I think you all said in the book that we have like 50,000 words approximately. Obviously we don't know that for everybody, but approximately 50,000 words that we have orthographically mapped as adults, and I mean I can't even imagine trying to memorize 50,000 words. That seems crazy. So that's why this process is different.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right, absolutely. This process is different. The protocol that we propose in this process also is not intended for this to have to be used with every single word that a student encounters, but it's about being able to put forth routines and a protocol that helps students attend to the different aspects of a word that need to be a part of a mapping process, to go into long-term memory, so that this becomes automatic or internal for the student, that when they're looking at words independently, they are turning on these parts. Right, they're looking at the orthographic representation, breaking it apart, mapping it to its phonology and then considering its meaning. There has to be, as David Sherwood would say, there is a self-teaching process that comes into play.

Melissa:

Yeah, and I'm really glad, molly, I'm glad you brought up that. I see it all the time where people are asking like how do you orthographically map this word? And you can't do it Like that's not a thing, right? And I think sometimes there's some confusion with phoneme graphing, mapping of a word. But I'm also just wondering, like I see people have this goal in mind, right. Teachers are like I'm hearing how important orthographic mapping is. I want students to get there. We're going to get really detailed in the like how to do it, but just in the sense of things like how should teachers approach this idea of orthographic mapping instead of trying to say how do I orthographically map this word?

Molly Ness:

trying to say how do I orthographically map this word? Sure, so I always think of it as it's. For students to orthographically map a word, or for teachers to facilitate this process, we need to have this trifecta. And the trifecta around a word being orthographically mapped is the phonology, so it's sound structure, or it's phonographic correspondence. It's orthography, so how it is spelled structure, or it's phonographic correspondence. It's orthography, so how it is spelled, how it looks on the page, how it's visually represented, and then how it's meaning, what its meaning is. And that meaning isn't just, you know, a definition, it's also the semantics and the syntax of the word, what it's related to, how it's applied in context. And so when you think of that as a trifecta or kind of a three-legged stool, if you kick out one of the legs of those stools, you can't really get to words orthographically mapped. And I thought about this a lot with.

Molly Ness:

Probably my most prominent memory of my first year of teaching was my spelling instruction, because orthographically mapping is not just for decoding words or sort of lifting them off the page, it's also the process by which we can spell words. And so when I think back to my spelling instruction, I now understand why it was Friday test and Monday miss meaning. My kids would spell the word right on Friday at the test and then Monday they would miss it because I was not doing the word analysis, I was not getting at the meaning of the word. Even if you looked at what my spelling instruction looked like, it was quiet and I remember at the time being like, oh, students are working so hard as a quiet classroom. But quiet classroom, what are they not getting? They're not getting the sound structure of the word, they're not making a phonological representation to get to the part of the brain that needs that phoneme, grapheme representation. So it's also a process by which we put words on the page or we spell words.

Lori:

I'm assuming some routines are going to be helpful here for making words quote stick. We'll use your title of your book in this question, katie. Would you mind telling us a little bit about like? What are the? What are the steps, what are the things that make words stick? How do we orthographically map these words for our students, or help them orthographically map them, I should say?

Katie Pace Miles:

Thank you for that. So we have put together a four-step protocol based on what's been shown to support students in getting words into long-term memory, and it hits on the three aspects of orthographic mapping right. So you've got your phonology, your orthography and your meaning. So the four steps are see and say. Step one, that's your phonology You're seeing the word, you're saying the pronunciation of the word. The next step is segment and spell. So there you're getting into the orthographic representation of the word. The third step is study and suss out. So that's your meaning piece. And then the last step, the fourth step, is search and stick and that's where you get into the multiple exposures, so making sure that you're getting more opportunities, more hits at bat with that word or with similarly spelled words, or maybe I should say, and with similarly spelled words.

Lori:

I love that. I want to talk about each one in a little bit more detail. Is now the time to dive in? Are you both good with that? Sure, okay, all right, so can you kind of walk us through? I know, katie, you just gave the high level overview, but like if we wanted to dive into each part a little bit more, and then I do want to linger in that search and stick a little bit with those repeated exposures. I think there's so much rich conversation that we can have there, but I'll start by backing us up to step one. See and say what actually happens in that step. How do we help students build that phonology?

Molly Ness:

Sure, so this one is probably the most obvious. You literally show students the word and that may mean showing the word in different typography so that they understand that a lowercase G in one font looks different than a lowercase G but it still represents the same sound. So kids are literally seeing the word and they are saying the word aloud. They're hearing their teacher say the word, they are chorally saying the word or echo using some of that great fluency work to echo the word, but they are literally getting that process of getting to the phonological representation of the word. So that's see and say, which is probably the most familiar and the most obvious. The next portion is segment and spell and this is where you take the word and you do that rich instruction in phoneme-grapheme correspondence. So you point out whatever linguistic features that students are familiar with. So this is where you might draw attention to a digraph and remind students that the two letters in the digraph actually make one sound. We might call attention to kind of anomalies in words, so a silent letter or a vowel team that doesn't represent the sound that it traditionally represents. So you're doing some of that heart word meaning, that protocol that so many people are familiar with. You're really doing that phoneme grapheme correspondence.

Molly Ness:

I will pass it to Katie for study and suss out, but I will say the origin of suss out. Study and suss out, but I will say the origin of suss out. Suss is a British term. I am a little bit of a theater buff and I went to see the who's Tommy on Broadway and there's this great line where you're going to have the characters that have to suss everything out and suss means to figure something out. So when we're talking about the meaning and the usage of the word, we're sussing it out, we're studying it and figuring out how to use it, what it means, what it's related to. So Katie will cover study and suss out as well as search and stick.

Katie Pace Miles:

And Molly. I just wanted to go back one second and let our listeners know that each one of those steps, there's research on this that it seems so obvious when you're saying see and say Okay, so see the word and say the word Not profound, right? But there's this incredible article from Rosenthal and Airy, and I think the year is 2008, where they had this breakthrough study in vocabulary learning.

Katie Pace Miles:

They were looking at classrooms where, when vocabulary instruction was happening, the word was not displayed. So the spelling of the word was not displayed. And Julie Rosenthal conducted this study with Dr Erie and they found that when you show the spelling of the word while you're doing this vocabulary instruction, the words were better retained in long-term memory. It's one of my. It's a very complicated study that puts forth this very obvious thing in literacy instruction. But teachers up to that point, when they were working on vocabulary, had not been showing the spellings of the vocabulary words.

Molly Ness:

And they also. We also and I say this being guilty of this I wasn't having my students say words, so I would teach the word, but we never went through that. Here's what the word sounds like. Say it with me. You turn to a partner and say it, and obviously, how can you use a word if you don't know how it's pronounced or how it sounds? And so that oral component really needs to be a part of that word study instruction.

Melissa:

I was just going to say I, so I have a. My son is just finishing up kindergarten right now. So you know, we're right in the thick of it of learning how to read, and I have the joy of seeing him starting to decode words, which is amazing. But what you said, molly, about the different typography and showing the different ones, that is so important and I didn't even think about it. But I mean, he sees all the time. You know these. A new book that we're reading has the letter I written, just the line going down right, without the lines at the top and bottom, so he's reading it as an L, you know, and so and I just have to say to him well, in this case this is an uppercase I and it's just so funny, like little things like that. Or the G, when the G is that, that weird looking G, but yeah, it's so important, little things that just make such a big difference, especially at the very beginning.

Katie Pace Miles:

Absolutely Listen. My younger kid was in kindergarten and I asked him to write a G the other day and he did the squiggly the one. What do we?

Lori:

call that Like an old English G, like the very fancy one, the very fancy G.

Katie Pace Miles:

He wrote the very fancy G. I mean I think he was giving me a hard time, I don't know, right, yeah, so Well, I mean, it just shows that you're doing a great job exposing him to various funks. Absolutely. Thank you, kudos to you.

Molly Ness:

I'll take that mom credit Right, they're hard to come by, yeah.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right. I was going to give just one more example of research of which it abounds when it comes to this protocol, like what substantiates why we pick these steps when Molly mentioned segment and spell and Molly and I are always disclosing what we used to do in our teaching that doesn't align to what we recommend. Now there are two articles recommend. Now there's a great. There are two articles and it's Ari Satlow, gaskins or Ari Gaskin Satlow, and I'll find these. They have this keywords protocol.

Katie Pace Miles:

It was one of my favorite studies when I was working with Linnea. They have this very simple protocol of and this was at Benchmark School, which was a school for students with dyslexia, and the protocol of. And this was at Benchmark School, which was a school for students with dyslexia, and the protocol was you see the word, you say the word, you count the sounds in the word and then you match how many sounds were in the word with how many letters you see in the word and from the second I read that article way back in the day I thought, well, isn't that exactly what I was missing in my instruction? I never stopped and I was early elementary and then a reading specialist in upper elementary. I never really stopped and worked with striving readers on.

Katie Pace Miles:

I know this must be so confusing. There's three sounds in whale, but you're seeing five letters. So how do we reconcile that? It would just constantly be W-H-S-Y, you know, and B-C-E and moving on, but it's giving students that space to say wow. This happens a lot where I'm hearing fewer sounds than there are letters and I'm going to have to figure out what's going on here.

Melissa:

All right. So let's go back to the steps. We talked about. Number one, see and say number two, segment and spell. And let's jump into number three study and suss out. And Katie, I think you're taking this one, yes.

Katie Pace Miles:

Sure. So study and suss out is where you're activating the meaning of the word. So we want students to understand the definition, but also the multiple meanings behind each one of those definitions, and to use it, to use the word in context. So we have a lot of activities that we are recommending at different grade levels. So one of the things, too, is, for each grade level band, we're recommending that you do different sorts of activities, such as word webs or expert word cards that you can use to activate meaning.

Katie Pace Miles:

We have paint swatch activities, which some of you may have used before in your classrooms. We have word part organizers that get to the morphology of the word and so on. So that is study and suss out. And then we have search and stick. So search and stick has to do.

Katie Pace Miles:

For me, this is all about getting more exposures to the word and ensuring that you're able to use the word across multiple contexts, that you're able to find the words in text, to embed it in text, to make sure that, again, you just are able to activate that what has been stored thus far, that you can activate it and bring it forth at the end of the lesson. So what we're recommending is that you move through one activity for each part of that protocol and what we give are multiple options for each part of the protocol, so you can kind of think of it like a menu. So you have this framework. You're going to do four steps in your framework or four steps in your protocol. You pick one activity and you change it up to keep things fun and engaging for the students.

Molly Ness:

I will also add that there's a category of words that one of the steps is a little bit different for when we talk about function words, I always refer to function words as these little words that are the semantic glue of sentences. If you have ever played charades and you you know pantomime. Little word or small word.

Molly Ness:

Function words are those small words that hold meaning in the sentence but can't really be defined.

Molly Ness:

They are the words like were and there, and from and of, and all of those words that we see over and over again but you can't define.

Molly Ness:

How do I define of, Draw a picture of from, what does that look like? And so when we think about those function words they're a little bit different. So the study and suss out is going to look more at the application of those function words than actually defining them, drawing a picture of them, that sort of thing. So what you might do is you might take, like, if you think about sort of Mad Libs, where students have a word bank and you have a passage where you've omitted some of the function words in that passage, they have to apply the correct function word at the correct space so that their application of the word is based more on usage and application than the literal meaning, which doesn't really pertain to those function words. And we know with all this evidence that function words are particularly problematic for striving readers. They're particularly problematic for our multilingual learners as well. So we really want to address them as a part of the instructional protocol, with one slight twist.

Katie Pace Miles:

One of the things I'll add to that is an activity that we do with function words is we have a cut up sentence and then you're arranging, you're creating a proper sentence and we have some foils in there, so some extra words, and students need to figure out where those function words go. And that comes out of a study Arian Wills, I think it was 1983 or 5. And again I will send that where that was actually part of their assessment, where they were moving the cards into place, checking to see if students were able to use function words properly. And I had the great fortune of running some studies with Dr Airy where we investigated kindergartners' ability to read and use function words in sentences and they were high frequency function words and we had some very interesting findings about students' ability to read the function words, but they were not able to use the function words properly. And we were working with both multilingual learners and native English speakers.

Melissa:

Katie. Now I don't want to hear more about that, so I'm just going to ask a follow-up question. Just what was like? Why, why, why were students able to read the words but not use the words?

Katie Pace Miles:

I the why is a mystery. Right, it's the most important question. I think it was their lack of exposure to the words in the English language. So we could teach them how to analyze the representation of the word. We could give them opportunities to quote, unquote, memorize the word. We could give them opportunities to spell the word.

Katie Pace Miles:

But if they hadn't heard that word in context enough, they didn't have the use case for that word, so the word gave comes to mind where I asked one of the students to use gave in a sentence. This was a multilingual learner and she said gave went to the store. Oh, my goodness. Okay, and that was happening routinely where students were attempting to use function words as nouns.

Lori:

Yeah, oh my gosh, I mean it's like funny almost, but like it's makes so much sense, right, because you're just, you're just making that replacement in your brain, yeah that's right, and if you've never heard it used, then yeah, a noun is like the easiest thing, like you want it to be a noun.

Katie Pace Miles:

That's right. I have two studies I could send you on that where we analyzed data two different ways.

Melissa:

So I'm happy to share that. All right, let's jump back into the steps. Let's go, let's get back to the steps, and you mentioned I think Katie, you mentioned that you know really. I mean, the majority of the book is just like here are things that you can do as a teacher, which, my goodness, they're gonna love that. But you mentioned that you all kind of broke it up into different grade bands and I'm wondering if you could just talk you don't have to go into super detail but just give some ideas of how are those the things that you give teachers to try in their classrooms? How are they different at the different grade levels? I mean, I can imagine in K-1, they're just learning basic words, whereas, you know, it gets into some trickier words as they get older, it gets into the multisyllabic words. So what kinds of things are different throughout the different grade bands?

Molly Ness:

Yeah, and I'll back up with the context about this a little bit, because this is something that Katie and I actually, in the writing, really struggled with. We were not sure. Well, how do you make recommendations for K and one and two and three and four and five which are sort of these arbitrary, like we've all decided that based on whatever the norms are, that you know if you're eight years old you're going to be an X grade. But really, when you start to understand Aries phases of reading, you start to understand why your instruction needs to be tailored for the reading behaviors of reading. You start to understand why your instruction needs to be tailored for the reading behaviors of children, so that it's the Aries phases that guide what sort of approach you take, rather than grade level or sort of those constraints. So Katie obviously learned from the legend herself about Aries phases and can explain, like, why do we even talk about Ares phases in this book? So that as the sort of the framework for here's how to tailor your instruction based on that work.

Katie Pace Miles:

This is really complicated. I want to acknowledge that too. It's really complicated because Ares is very, very clear that she uses the term phases, not stages, and so phases refers to the predominant phase that the student is in with regards to how they are storing words in memory with regards to their ability to read and spell the words.

Katie Pace Miles:

So these phases can be overlapping, and you know, I'm thinking of my kindergartner at home, right, who is able to read many words and spell many words, but that does not mean that he is in the consolidated phase, right. He has a few words that he is in that phase with. He has a few where he's in the full alphabetic phase Overwhelmingly. He's in the partial alphabetic phase though, and so that is the phase where my kindergartner exists Overwhelmingly. That is how he is engaging with words, okay, so I just want to make sure that I specify that and also that in each chapter, when we break the activities up into these bands, as Molly said, there's K1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We do say, you know, students typically in these grades are in this phase, right, but I want to acknowledge there are many teachers out there that are working with fourth and fifth graders who are in the partial alphabetic phase.

Katie Pace Miles:

A lot of my work is working with older students that are in the partial or full alphabetic phase, and Ari makes this point that so many older striving readers are actually stuck in the partial alphabetic phase. We think of them stuck at the full because that's one below consolidated, but it's really the partial because they have incomplete phonics knowledge. So what we did is we thought about students for whom they would need extra practice with their word work skills in these grade bands. We thought about what type are they working with one syllable words, even within one syllable words? What type of phonetic elements would they experience in kindergarten and first grade? And we do talk about that in the chapter as well. We kind of give this profile of what's happening in that grade band with regards to phase and phonetic element knowledge, based on those two things. Developmentally, what would students be interested in doing with words? And then we put forth the menu of options.

Molly Ness:

And to make it even more complicated, we talked about this sort of 50,000 number at the beginning of our time together, where most adult readers have about 50,000 words orthographically mapped. Well, wouldn't it be awesome if there were grade level benchmarks for what should my you know, what number of words should my kids have, mapped by X period? And there just is not that research yet that research. Yet we know that lots of students are sort of below this decoding threshold, where they have fewer than typically about 10,000 words by eighth grade. And what happens with those kids is we see issues with comprehension.

Molly Ness:

Well, if you back up to what is that comprehension really? Sort of, how do we see it manifest? Well, it's actually really they don't have enough words orthographically mapped so that they are always having compromised fluency because they're decoding all these words. And so what suffers? Well, it's the comprehension. And so, just to make the point that we don't really have this benchmark of by third grade students should have X number of words mapped of. By third grade students should have X number of words mapped. Or by, you know, fifth grade, it should be this number. Really, the research says about 10,000 words by the end of eighth grade, and then there's this big gap again until 50,000 as adult readers, but we just are not yet there in terms of more concrete findings around numbers themselves.

Lori:

Okay. So when we're thinking about, like all of these ideas here, how did you take these phases and put them into grades, like for the sake of this book?

Katie Pace Miles:

We talked with I mean, we, we put it forth, and other people have done this as well. Where they have, they have worked either, yeah, with Dr Aries' consultation, or they know a lot about the theory of orthographic mapping. That goes into phase theory as well. So you really need to understand the theory of orthographic mapping and you need to understand Aries' theory of word reading and spelling, and that's phase theory. Phase theory is exactly that. So phase theory is where and I'm sorry I was saying those terms as if every reader or every listener knows them, but Aries phase theory goes from pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic phase. Those phases are based on what I had mentioned before, which is, what are they able to use with regards to their phonetic knowledge, to store words in memory so that they can both read and spell the words environmental, print and whatnot, and then I won't walk you through all the phases, but we can definitely link to an article. Ari has many wonderful articles for teachers on that.

Katie Pace Miles:

So when you've taught, though, and you've worked with, when you've worked with, students, you read these phases and you think, okay, it is reasonable to say that kindergartners and first graders are existing in this partial alphabetic, moving into the full alphabetic phase. It's reasonable that second and third graders are in full, moving towards consolidated and so on and so forth, and fourth and fifth graders are hopefully. I mean, with what we expect of fourth and fifth graders. They really need to be in the consolidated phase. They need to have an enormous corpus of words stored in long-term memory that they're able to automatically read and spell. That's what's accurately right. That's what's going on when you're in the consolidated phase. So and again, caveats all over the place here, which is that you may be working with students who are at a different phase but are in those grade bands, and that's that's okay. So long as you understand the theory of orthographic mapping and you understand phase theory, then you can move through the. You can actually pick what activities would work best for you in your protocol.

Lori:

Thank you. Okay, that's really helpful. I I'm really excited to actually I mean, I know I have a PDF of your book, but I'm very excited to get a hard copy. So, as I'm re-listening to this podcast again, I can flip it open and look at exactly what you're talking about. So can't wait for that. I do want to go back, though, to this idea of the exposures that we talked about. Like is there a magic number of exposures? Okay, if I'm like all the student is struggling, if I just give them 100 exposures, they'll get it. I don't think that that you're going to say yes to this, but you know there's always hope that there's an easy answer here. So I'd love to hear a little bit about this exposure, or I guess another way we could frame it as the number of repetitions.

Molly Ness:

I don't know who wants to kick us off. Well, I'll set the stage and say you're correct, there is no magic number, and that it is all about not just the quantity but also the quality Meaning. If we're just giving kids the here's what the word looks like, but not connecting it to its meaning and its semantics and syntax and all those other things, then that's not a particularly rich encounter. So you know, less likely, of course, to see transfer.

Molly Ness:

The research around the actual numbers themselves is a little bit varied. It started in 1983, I believe We've got a lovely 2020 article that looked at the number of exposures for students at risk of reading difficulties versus the number of students not at risk, and that article provides the numbers of like five to six exposures. Other researchers, like our Israeli colleague David Scher, says it's more like two to four. Of course, the literacy legend herself, linnea Airy, says that it can be on the spectrum or the range of four exposures for readers that are higher level, all the way to nine exposures for readers who are at lower levels of development. So you know pretty big range here.

Katie Pace Miles:

And the one thing I'll jump in and say what Molly is referring to are findings from certain studies, and the important thing to note is that those findings are based on the methodological design that went into that study and that matters with regards to what was the research question, what were the words being used and what were the measures being used and how much time was there to conduct the study.

Katie Pace Miles:

Was this a two-week intervention study where students were working for 20 minutes every day? I could go through a whole thing on the methodology, but those findings are constrained to the methodological design and so that should not be taken, as it takes four exposures for a word to be stored. That's not what it says. You should think of it as in that in this study where they did this thing and measured it in this way, it took four exposures, and in this other study where they were looking at the population of first grade striving readers using that design, the certain group of striving readers needed five exposures versus nine exposures, and so on, a certain group of striving readers needed five exposures versus nine exposures, and so on. And so to say that striving readers need over 20 exposures or over 40 is I just? I don't think we have. I don't. I don't have the citation for that at this point.

Lori:

Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me and that was the answer I was thinking you both were going to share, because, you know, when you think I know, molly, you you referenced, going back to all of those components, right, and you know, if we just like take one of those, like, for example, you know the meaning component, we can't say what meaning, what spider webs I have in my brain that are connecting all of these, you know, stems of knowledge and vocabulary versus your brain, right and so for. And also, it really depends on the word too, right? I mean, we didn't say that but let's lift that up but it depends on the reader, the word, or you know words that they have in their semantic map, that they already have semantically mapped. So there's so many factors.

Lori:

I think it's really difficult to say like there's a one size fits all approach to this, and I appreciate you both, kind of like giving us the big picture definition and reasoning there. I think it really helps as we think about it. We all want that easy answer. We want to say it's five times if you're, you know, whatever, and it's just not not that way and nothing is that way in teaching Right.

Molly Ness:

So yeah, and wouldn't that way in teaching right? So no, and wouldn't it be great if it were that way. But we just want to be really clear so that no listener is saying like I did, the five, this study said five, I gave five exposures and it's not transferring or it's not sticking. What gives, it's not that cut and dry. It never really is in classrooms and working with kids.

Katie Pace Miles:

Laura Stacy has great research on this too. Where, to your point, laurie, where she was looking at the reader's skills that they brought to the table, and then the length of the word and the saliency of the word whether it was a salient noun or not and those factors also played into how many exposures it required for the word to be stored. So you know, in research these are all about interactions, the student interacting with all of these other variables that come into play.

Lori:

Such a good point. Totally, we'll link all of this stuff in the show notes. As you're talking, katie, I'm Googling frantically to grab as many things as I can, so it's great.

Melissa:

I've been really curious, as we've been talking about that, I'm going to keep going back to that 50,000 words, which just blows my mind, and I'm thinking like this is such a simple. You know these four steps are simple. You guys give tons of ways that people can do it in different ways, but I'm also thinking you probably don't do that with every single word that ends up being mapped. So, like, how does that work? Does it like if I, if I go through these steps with one word, does some of that kind of overlap into other words? Like I'm thinking of spelling might be similar for another word that I might take it over there, or the meaning of, you know, parts of the word might be similar to another word? Does it? Does it kind of translate like that? Like can I orthographically map a word in a different way that doesn't go through these four steps?

Molly Ness:

Yeah, that's such a good question because obviously teachers are pressed for time. And how do you do this protocol that has four steps with 50,000 words. Yeah, it's just. It's just not possible With 50,000 words or the word that follows the linguistic pattern.

Katie Pace Miles:

We were pushed to clarify this point in the book that it is not expected that a four-step protocol would be used to get 50,000 words in memory. That's not at all the case. What we are aware of is that for many students, they need explicit, systematic instruction to get words into memory. And then this, as we had mentioned before from David's chair, this process can be internalized right, and so when you get into the habit of making sure you are putting your eyes on the word and you're saying the word, or you're asking an adult to say the word for you, when you're reconciling the spelling to the pronunciation and that becomes part of your word analysis routine, whether you're a third grader who's just doing this independently now, like my daughter's in third grade, and she knows, like, slow down and figure out, how am I going to work with this word that is unknown to me, and I shouldn't be satisfied reading the word and not knowing what it means. That is just an explicit. That's something we're trying to build awareness of is you should know.

Katie Pace Miles:

If a teacher is asking you to read and spell a word, you should ask what it means if you don't know it and let's help you with that. So again, this isn't, we're not. Let's help you with that. So again, this isn't, we're not going to be able to do this with 50,000, but it's helping students. But let's even go so far as to say empowering students to build up their skills that they can use when an adult isn't around and or when they need to go seek an adult support to learn a word. And by learn again, we're saying the whole right. The trifecta Learn the word is both its spelling, meaning and pronunciation Spelling, pronunciation and meaning. Let's put it that way.

Melissa:

Yeah, that makes so much sense, that internalization. You know they go through these steps so many times in different ways. Then they can start to do that on their own, Like I mean, that's, it has to happen that way. There's no way that we can do that for every word, for every student.

Molly Ness:

And I would, actually I would even. We're living a lot in the world of K through five right now in our conversation. I'm doing a lot of work in middle schools with content area teachers who are introducing content specificspecific vocabulary. And when we think about introducing vocabulary, it's still the trifecta. You're a seventh-grade biology teacher and you're teaching the word mitosis. You still have to have kids know its meaning, know how it looks and maps onto the sound. So you still have to have that sort of trifecta of things. Even if you're sort of thinking I'm actually teaching word meanings To map that word, you still got to get to that trifecta.

Lori:

So important. Yeah, I see that a lot at home with my own child. I'll think that she has words mapped and I'll be like write this word down for me. If I like I'll have her make lists for me or whatever, and I'll notice, oh, she missed that. You know that's actually two letters that make that one sound and I'm like, okay, you're missing something here. What do you think it is? But that like quick encoding activity is like a great window into what students or what kids know and what they might be missing, where there might be gaps. So you're right, it takes all three.

Katie Pace Miles:

And coding really is right. The vehicle through which you can assess a student's storage of the word in memory.

Lori:

Yeah, it's like that, peeking in, like literally peeking under the hood, yep, yep. Well, we are just so grateful that you both took so much time to talk with us about your new book Making Words Stick. Is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with?

Molly Ness:

Well, the only thing I would add is we situate this whole conversation in a basic understanding of what do we mean by the reading brain, this whole conversation in a basic understanding of what do we mean by the reading brain, because we really believe that teachers, who have the enormous responsibility of changing students' brains every day which is so powerful that you got to have the user's manual to that you wouldn't want to go to a chiropractor who doesn't know how the spine works we as teachers have to have real concrete understanding of how the reading brain works, and so we get to talk a little bit about that and once you really understand what this whole thing of the reading brain is, you start to understand why in some cases words stick and in other cases they don't. So I hope readers will also walk away with some of the basic fascination that we have about the reading brain.

Katie Pace Miles:

I'll put a plug in for more resources for teachers that I can offer, which is through my nonprofit called the Reading Institute. I have two reading intervention programs that we distribute for free to teachers who need an intervention program free to teachers who need an intervention program. That is, it's an structured literacy intervention programs that has research and evidence behind it, and so you can go to the reading institute, nycorg, and you can sign up for trainings for reading ready or reading go. And the joy of this nonprofit is that we have grant funding that we can leverage to invite teachers to trainings and mail them a kit with these two structured literacy programs to use. Molly knows I have this big thing where I can't believe that teachers who want and need intervention programs sometimes are not able to sign up for the trainings of the programs being offered in their districts, or the trainings are too expensive or whatnot. So this is a great mission of mine to ensure the teachers have what they need to work with striving readers.

Melissa:

Yeah, that's a great resource. Thank you for sharing.

Lori:

Yeah, and if you're listening, it's readinginstitutenycorg. Just a quick make sure you have it and we'll link it in the show notes. We're linking it in the show notes.

Melissa:

Well, thank you both for being here today. We're so, so grateful for you to be here, but also to write this amazing book, and we can't wait to get it.

Molly Ness:

Well, thanks for having us, and thanks not only for having us, but also for the work that you guys do in empowering teachers in an everyday context and making knowledge so practical and consumable for teachers.

Katie Pace Miles:

I echo that. Thank you both.

Lori:

Thank you. We couldn't do it without amazing guests like yourselves, so thank you.

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.