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Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ®
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy® is a podcast for teachers. The hosts are your classroom-next-door teacher friends turned podcasters learning with you. Episodes feature top literacy experts and teachers who are putting the science of reading into practice. Melissa & Lori bridge the gap between the latest research and your day-to-day teaching.
Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ®
Research-Based Routines for Multisyllabic Word Reading with Jessica Toste and Brennan Chandler
Episode 237
Teachers know the challenge: students hit multisyllabic words and suddenly reading slows down. In this episode, researchers Jessica Toste and Brennan Chandler share research-based routines that make multisyllabic word reading easier, more automatic, and more effective. You’ll hear practical strategies rooted in the research to help your students tackle big words!
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Multi-syllabic word reading is tricky. Big words are where many readers get stuck, especially for older students who are still working on decoding. In the first five minutes of this episode, we'll tell you exactly why this matters.
Melissa:Our guests today are two incredible researchers, jessica Tost and Brennan Chandler. They'll help us understand why multi-syllabic word reading gets more complex, which classroom routines really work and how you can support students even when time and resources are tight.
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, jessica and Brennan, welcome to the podcast. We can't wait to talk all about words with you today.
Jessica Toste:Thanks so much for having us. I'm excited to be here.
Brennan Chandler:I'm excited to be here as well.
Melissa:Excellent, and so I'm excited to talk about multisyllabic words because I know, like the past few years, everyone's been talking about the science of reading, which has been a lot of talk about phonics, instruction and that very beginning stage of learning to read, but there have now been more and more questions about okay, well, what happens when my kids get into third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, even middle school, and we have multisyllabic words? So why are multi-syllabic words so important for our older readers?
Jessica Toste:This is a great question because as students move into those intermediate grades, the challenge isn't just more complex content that they have in front of them and more complex text, but the words themselves are becoming more complex and reading comprehension relies on being able to accurately and efficiently access words that we're reading. So the complexity of those words is really important for us to think about and ensure that students have support in order to access them and read them and understand and make meaning from the text they have in front of them at school. And the reason why it's so important to think about these complex words is that as students move into the upper elementary grades, multisyllabic words really dominate academic text. Every time students are reading content text in their content areas, most of the new academic words that they are faced with are multisyllabic in nature. They're more complex.
Jessica Toste:It's been estimated there's some work that looks at the types of words that students are reading in academic text, and it's estimated that students encounter more than 20,000 multisyllabic words in print every year, and these words really carry the meaning of the text that they're reading. So if they don't know those words, there's really a lag in their comprehension. They're unable to figure out what that sentence or that text is telling them what information is really central to what they're reading. And we know that students who have inefficient word level reading skills tend to skip over these words. They'll inaccurately read these words but not recognize the error in accurately reading the word, and that really impacts the way that they're accessing text and the way they're making meaning and the way they're engaging with new content in their classes.
Melissa:That's so many words just 20,000 a year. That's so so many words that if you don't know it, you know you're just not going to understand what you're reading. And I liked what you were saying. It's not even just like I can read the word and I know, I, but I don't know what that word is, I don't know what it means you're talking about. Even just reading the word, like just decoding the word we're talking about, right, absolutely.
Jessica Toste:Absolutely yeah.
Melissa:I think my question there would be like well, if students have cracked the code and they know how to read single syllable words, what makes it so much harder to read a multisyllabic word? Like you would think, can't they just take what they know from reading single syllable words and apply that to a multisyllable word? But why is it so much harder?
Jessica Toste:Yeah, they. So we call them complex words because of all these other sort of new features that happen more within multi-syllabic words. So students will take kind of serial decoding approaches that they've been really successful with in foundational reading and those don't apply in the same way as you get to multisyllabic words. So a few things that I'll share, and Brennan will jump in too and share some reasons of why multisyllabic words are really more difficult to decode. The first one seems kind of silly and obvious to even say, but it's just that they are longer. The increased word length alone makes them harder. If you have a student who even relies a little bit on serial decoding so like saying each kind of sound and blending it together, that becomes very difficult when you have a long word that has 10 or 12 letters in it. So that alone is a little trickier. If you have a student who struggled with reading or who's been in intervention and this has not been something that has come easy to them, that long word in front of you also feels a little bit stressful, like it took a long time to get successful in decoding and now you're asking me to deal with this huge word in front of me. So the word length alone makes them more complex.
Jessica Toste:The other thing is that in foundational programs we teach students grapheme-phoneme correspondences, letter sound correspondences, and we teach them sort of how to use that consistently. We teach them hopefully in a little bit of flexibility in that, but they've really learned those letter sound correspondences and how to apply them. And in multisyllabic words those letter sound correspondences are less predictable. So there are patterns and letters that students see that in previous words it always would have said that letter or pattern would have always said a certain sound and now it's not saying that sound anymore and there isn't necessarily anything in the word that's indicating to them that it is different.
Jessica Toste:So the examples I always give in training because I think they come up and they're sort of like the ones that the first time you see you're like why does that say that word Is kernel? So C-O-L-O-N-E-L. Why, when I look at that, would I say kernel? There's nothing indicating to me that I would pronounce it that way. So the predictability of that word is reduced. Is making a k sound. So in some programs we've taught students that sometimes when they see CH it will make a k sound. But a lot of students, especially those who have been in intervention for a while, have learned years in and out that CH says ch, ch says ch, and now they see it, they want to say ch at the beginning of a word and it's not doing that anymore. So you can think of many, many examples in multisyllabic words, but there's less predictability, and so that reduction in predictability makes them harder for students to access. And I'll let Brennan share a couple of other reasons.
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, I'll go ahead and further complicate some of the reasons why multisyllabic word reading is so tricky. In English we have stressed and unstressed syllables and we have multisyllabic words we kind of add in. We have a time-based sort of pattern to our reading and how we talk, and so in English when a syllable is unstressed the vowel sound often changes or gets reduced, usually so we call it a schwa sound, like in the second syllable of banana. It's that sound, and so that means when kids hear or say the word out loud it doesn't always match that pure vowel sound that they might expect from their traditional phonics program in K2. So banana family.
Brennan Chandler:Some people just reduce that, that syllable in the middle and say family and not even have that there, and so that can really throw a kid off when they're going to read these words. What is an uh? Why am I saying uh so much? We can't purely say every actual pure vowel sound and we read these longer words and on top of that, figuring out where the syllables break is often also not straightforward, and so when kids try to read long words we kind of give them hints about the syllables, and where the syllable lands we have might have a different vowel sound. It might be a long sound or short sound, but that gets that becomes really tricky deciding which vowel sound to use. It can really throw kids off when they're reading these words and they're thinking, oh my gosh, every word, like in single syllable words, should have these pure vowel sounds.
Brennan Chandler:Another reason that even complicates it, and our last reason really, is this idea of morphological constancy, which is basically this idea that the spelling of a morpheme, like a base word or a prefix, tends to stay the same across related words, even when the pronunciation changes or shift. And so the word magic and magician right, that magic part, stays the same. We sort of add that suffix. There it actually changed the sound. That final C sound changes, but the spelling retains. The spelling stays the same.
Brennan Chandler:Nation and national right. We kind of derive a different form of our phonology, our sound, but the spelling is the same. And so we teach skilled readers, use their knowledge of these consistent patterns to connect related words. But if a student hasn't been taught to look for these relationships, each new word can sometimes feel like they're starting from scratch. And so really all of this to say all these long words, multi-syllabic words, big words aren't just hard because they're long. That's one reason, but really it's really all comes down to the hidden vowel changes and the sound shifts. Um, that, really that really makes them really really tricky to read and to spell.
Lori:Yeah, I love that term sound shifts. I'm going to start using that. I like it. Um, you said something about teaching students. This like, if students haven't been taught and I I kind of want to get into that a little bit more what are some effective ways to teach students how to read multi-syllabic words? I, you know, I'm imagining it's not effective to stop students every time they come to a multi-syllabic word and be like, okay, let's unpack this every single time. So I imagine we have to give them strategies and help them understand these concepts that you just talked about, and are there any programs that do this like we can look to for guidance? So, jessica, I'm going to turn it over to you first.
Jessica Toste:Yeah.
Jessica Toste:So I'll preface this by saying, even though we have decades of research on sort of foundational skills instruction, what early reading development looks like, how students become proficient in word reading, we don't have as much work looking at what does that look like as we move into these complex words. We sort of think, well, students become proficient readers, and now they're proficient readers. But the reality is all students, so all of our learners, as they move into kind of third, fourth grade and beyond, do need some continued word reading instruction to help them transition into reading these complex words and to understand how the word reading skills they've been successful with before, how those are going to become more flexible or applied in a little bit more flexible way to access these complex words. And then, for students who have reading difficulties or language difficulties, they really require more targeted explicit instruction in order to access multisyllabic words. So they require similar kind of systematic explicit instruction that they've received in foundational skills to transition that into complex words, to move from serial decoding into being more efficient to recognize affixes, so prefixes and suffixes in words. And in order to do this we know that what seems to be most successful, what not seems to be what is most successful is that students really need to have a structured but flexible approach to decode complex words and they need to be taught this approach because they're not necessarily have been practicing flexibility in early grades as they're learning to decode.
Jessica Toste:And so when we think about this approach, what it looks like, there's some research on different research-based practices that support students' reading of complex words, how to learn about multisyllabic words and strategies to decode those, and what those practices really do is help students move from these foundational skills into kind of a bridge to complex words, a bridge of like supporting them in being flexible, support in the way that they decode and the way that they think of words, and I think of a lot of multi-Slavic word reading instruction, building on students having a strong foundation already of understanding grapheme-phoneme correspondences, understanding how to decode, moving in towards more fluency and efficiency with decoding.
Jessica Toste:But now they need another layer of kind of learning strategies to be flexible and continuing to practice that flexibility in order to optimize their reading. So there are a few practices we can kind of we're going to talk about some instructional routines, I think, that are most effective for students. We also have my team and I developed a number of years ago a program called Word Connections, which is a supplemental targeted reading intervention that includes these research-based instructional practices. So they're included in a structured way that's all packaged and ready to go that a teacher can pick up and use for intervention.
Lori:Let's talk about some routines that teachers can use to teach multisyllabic words. There's four we're going to talk about today the essential skills routine, the syllabication routine, a morphology routine and an oral reading fluency routine. So let's start with that essential skills routine. Brennan, can you tell us a little bit about that?
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, let's do it. So we'll kind of outline four routines that Jess kind of alluded to are these active ingredients and effective multi-syllabic word reading instruction. And the first one is what we call the essential skills routine and really we could think of this routine as a brief warm-up for students learning to tackle multisyllabic words and it's built on the idea that vowels really, as we talked about with multisyllabic word reading, are a tricky part of big words because English uses the same spelling often for multiple sounds. We'll call those the variant correspondences, and so spelling often for multiple sounds, we'll call those the variant correspondences. And so for example, the vowel team EA can say E like in heat and E like in bread and A like in great right, and so in this routine we want to kind of fill in these foundational phonics gaps and kind of provide a warm-up when we go into the other routines that really target more of the complexities of multisyllabic word reading.
Brennan Chandler:And so in this routine we can simply pick out like a vowel type so we could think about our controlled vowels or consonant vowel or CVE words, magic E words or other vowel teams as well, and we're going to zero in on a few of those vowel teams at a time and then we're going to train students to recognize all the sounds it can make.
Brennan Chandler:And so if we're thinking about R-controlled vowels, we can say we can kind of drill them almost with flashcards. Right, er says R, ar says R, all of those right. So we'll kind of go through that and then we're just going to simply have them read some single syllable words with those vowel teams embedded, sort of to again to get their brains warmed up to then go ahead and tackle these longer words. We can have them read some short decodable sentences as well. But this really is a brief routine, just a couple minutes, from sound to word to even sentence, to fill in some of those phonics gaps that many older students might have. And it kind of also gives them that added knowledge for when they go to read and spell single syllable words still, kind of also gives them the added knowledge for when they go to read and spell single syllable words still, and it again fills in those gaps so they can go ahead and start attacking those words with a little more confidence instead of just guessing.
Lori:Oh my gosh, I love that. I love the idea too of calling it an essential skills routine. It's like the foundation and what I'm hearing you say is that the fluency for those, for example, the vowel teams that you mentioned. It's really important that students have that understanding essentially from the beginning. So we're going to make sure they have that fluently and then we can go and build on. So, brennan, I know you're going to talk about the syllabication routine next, which I'm super interested in. Could you share a bit?
Brennan Chandler:more about that routine for teaching multisyllabic words. Yeah, and so after we sort of get them warmed up, we can think about that skill, that essential skills routine, right Again as the these essential components really of reading words. Um, we'll go ahead and get into the syllabication routine. And so this routine sort of is we need a routine like this because many students, especially those we know with reading difficulties, dyslexia, learning disabilities, don't have a reliable strategy for decoding and attacking words. We could think of this one as like, really like an attack strategy instead of guessing or skipping. And so we have, historically, a lot of times when we would think about how can we teach kids that struggle to learn how to read these words, give them a way to sort of unlock these words? And so we used to do a lot more of traditional, more syllable division, rules of thinking about types and how we divide the syllable and all of that to kind of give us as teachers sort of a structure on how to teach these words and sort of for students as well to sort of unlock these. But we're finding more and more that those patterns aren't as reliable and English doesn't always follow these neat patterns right. It's quasi-regular language, there's regular, but there's a lot of irregularities as well, and so, instead of thinking about the rules, we can teach them this flexible process to apply to really any big word that they encounter. And so this routine starts with what we call or I've kind of coined now as vowel roll call, meaning we want to warm students up by running through all the alternate pronunciations of the five vowel letters that all the five letters make plus Y, and so students say the short and long sounds for each vowel, you can put them up on the board, all right, a long sound, a short sound, a go through them kind of like a roll call, do the three sounds of Y, and this kind of gets their brains warmed up in prime for that flexibility.
Brennan Chandler:So we're really trying to teach strategic and flexible decoders, kind of as Jez talked about that bridge. We can think about kids who sometimes are over decoders, that serial decoding that they're kind of stuck on. And here we're going to think okay, when you see one of these five vowel, team or vowel, single vowels, they can make all these different sounds and they can also say or that schwa, so we can kind of introduce that as well. So we warm up with a little flexing and then we move into a strategy called Eshlav, or every syllable has at least one vowel done. There's been some great research done on this by O'Connor and colleagues, and this is really a flexible, syllable-based approach grounded in the simple truth that every syllable must have at least one vowel in English, and so it's a strategy. We're gonna model the strategy. There's about six steps here. Do you want me to tell you the steps?
Lori:I would love to hear the steps. Okay, all right, we'll talk about six steps here. Do you want me to tell you the steps? I would love to hear the steps.
Brennan Chandler:Okay, all right, we'll talk about the steps. So there's six steps here. But the importance here is we want to, we're going to model this a lot and provide a lot of guided practice with feedback. So it's not just kind of this one and done strategy. So the first thing we're going to do is, when we come to a big word, so we might, we might model this, let's say, with the word unbelievable that's often my go-to word First we're going to underline the vowels in the word. Then we're going to join the vowel team so they stay together. So in unbelievable we have I-E, so we're going to join those vowel teams together, and so this already gets kids thinking okay, here are all the vowels, the actual written vowels, so I can expect that many syllables in this word, because in English every single syllable has a vowel, and so we join those vowel teams together.
Brennan Chandler:The third part is is to circle the known parts, so the parts that you know. So these could be prefixes that we're going to teach maybe in the morphology routine. So in on, they might circle on, and then able, and there they might circle those or any base words they recognize, and so that helps them to start as we get into like kind of peeling off parts of the word they already know. We don't need to attend to every letter now. I want them to start unitizing larger parts. After you know, we think about their foundational phonics skills and decoding, and so they circle the known parts and then they count the parts. So they're counting the syllables based on the number of vowels, and so we have unbelievable un-ba-lieve-a-ble. So they count okay, there's going to be five syllables or five parts in this word. Then they're going to break the chunks apart, so they're going to read un-ba-lieve-a-ble, or we're going to model that, and then they're going to read the whole word aloud and sort of check it.
Brennan Chandler:Does that sound right? Right, does that sound right? Is that word, is that a word that I know already in my oral vocabulary, in my mental lexicon? And so we're going to model that, that, that that strategy. We're going to think aloud our process a few times. Provide them some guided practice too.
Brennan Chandler:When they go there and they're sort of we're going to we might give them a word list of words that would work well for the strategy and different types of couple syllables at a time, maybe words with more morphemes, words with less morphemes, and have them practice that a lot. But it's a nice routine because it's again we're kind of training that flexibility there. It's not this lockstep we might have to try. We're going to model, to being flexible as teachers model. Different pronunciations here be like oh, that doesn't sound right. Unbelieve able, oh no, all right, I'm going to flex that vowel sound. And so this strategy has been found to be pretty effective as a syllable based strategy with words that are long and it gives sort of a kit somewhere for kids to like anchor a little bit. That's not rule based, but really thinking about the actual premise of English was that really every singable has at least one vowel sound.
Melissa:Yeah, I love this idea of being flexible. My son's in. He's going into first grade, so he just finished kindergarten, so he's right in that spot of. You know he knows all of the most common sounds that letters make. But you know, as we're reading through some decodable books, he'll hit one or he's like why is this letter making this sound here? It blows his little mind. So I just love this idea of being explicit about teaching them this flexibility and really getting them into that mindset so they don't get stuck where he is right now. He's in a good place right now, but you don't want him to stay there. You want him to be able to have that flexibility.
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, exactly, I mean, really I always think about syllabication even more these days as sort of like an analogy of navigating city streets, so like if one road is blocked, we need alternate routes as readers, and so sort of a rules-only approach might just give you one map, but English, we love detours, we're quasi-regular in our language and so we want to make sure that we have sort of backup, sort of strategies. We're testing pronunciations and we really have to model that sometimes, especially with kids with reading disabilities or dyslexia, to sort of show them how to be a strategic decoder when the only way we know might not be the right way. That road might be blocked for us to read that word.
Melissa:I love that roadblock. Yeah, you can even use that with students. I feel like that would make sense for them. It's like, oh, we hit a roadblock, we're just going to try another way. Right, there's just another way to go. And, jessica, you're going to talk to us a little bit about morphology, which I'm really interested in, because when you all were talking about why multisyllabic words were so, you know, were difficult, I was looking at the word multisyllabic and I was thinking, oh, if a student was reading this.
Melissa:They might just read mole and then tis yeah, and then you know it throws off the whole word. But if they knew multi and saw that and knew that was you know the morphology of that word and knew it was a prefix there, that would help them tremendously for this really long word. So can you talk a little bit more about morphology and how it can help students with decoding?
Jessica Toste:Absolutely so. This routine really teaches students to identify and manipulate morphemes, so thinking about prefixes, suffixes, base words and really supporting them in that, improving their multislavic word reading and also their vocabulary, their understanding of the meaning of words. And this routine, like the others that Brennan was talking about, really the goal of getting students more strategic and flexible also really helps them when they come across those roadblocks or the barriers that they will come across as we move and as we develop as readers, and it can be very frustrating when you don't know how to access a word or you say it and it's incorrect, and so this is a good way of helping them understand that English requires us to be flexible in the way that we read and access words. So all of these kind of help students get there in a morphology routine really recognize that a lot of the words, as I mentioned right at the beginning that students are reading in intermediate grade text are multi-morphemic in nature and so we're moving into these words that have different structures to them and we need to think about how to access those structures. Students with difficulties in reading and language tend to have lower levels of morphological awareness, so to show recognition of these parts of words and this morpheme instruction reduces the overwhelm of all those things we talked about earlier that make multisyllabic words so challenging. It helps students create sort of smaller parts or chunks of words, that the whole thing together. If I look at the word multisyllabic, that might be unfamiliar to me as a word, but there's parts of that word that I might have familiarity with already and know how to decode, and then I can put that together and make meaning and decode the word successfully.
Jessica Toste:So there are kind of three big things in a morphology routine that are helpful for students. One is teaching them high frequency affixes, so teaching those prefixes and suffixes in isolation, and I'll explain this a little more in a moment. But that peel off strategy helps students practice exactly what I was saying before recognizing smaller chunks of words and successfully decoding those chunks and then reading the whole word. And then the third part of a morphology routine is really building words. So a lot of practice with building words and then reading those long big words as they put them together. So the first thing is teaching those high-frequency affixes so what are the most common prefixes and suffixes that we use in the English language and teaching students those in isolation, so teaching them pre P-R-E, making sure they see what it looks like, how it's spelled. They say it.
Jessica Toste:We think of words we already have familiarity with that we use on a daily basis that start with pre and we provide them with a definition. And in word connections we focus on definitions of words, of affixes, sorry that are high utility and transparent, so ones that if I know pre-means before. That's extremely useful to me as a reader and a comprehender and it's also very transparent pre-means before. That's easy to explain. Some affixes, especially suffixes, are less transparent in their definition. So they really have they serve a linguistic purpose in changing the function of the word but they don't necessarily have like a definition that I could explain to a student in six words or less. So really focus on defining the affixes that are going to help me as a reader make sense of what I'm reading and students consistently kind of referring back and practicing reading those affixes in isolation and then, as they get more comfortable with them, also referring to the prefixes and suffixes to help them make meaning from words too. So if they're seeing a new word that has pre in it, reminding them like remember pre means before word that has pre in it. Reminding them like, remember pre means before. So what do you think preheat might mean? Or what do you think pre I can't even think of another pre word in this moment I'm on the spot but what do you think whatever might mean. So getting them to integrate this knowledge as they keep building it.
Jessica Toste:The second thing I mentioned was teaching a peel-off strategy. So the idea of seeing a multi-syllabic word and being able to identify and peel off pieces of the word. So peel off the prefixes and suffixes and read those in isolation and then use that knowledge to then blend those parts together. So oftentimes if I'm doing this with students I'll kind of show them the parallel between serial decoding that they've learned in foundational skills instruction. So if I see H-A-T, h-a-t, h-a-t, if I see a multisyllabic word and I say the prefix, say the base word, say the suffix, then I can do the same thing. I can say each part and blend it together and say it fast.
Jessica Toste:So a peel-off strategy would have students kind of look at a multi-syllabic word, go through all of the word or multiple words if we're practicing and circle or underline or isolate in some way every prefix and every suffix that I see and make sure that I can read those, then being able to read the entire word by putting together the parts that I see and make sure that I can read those, then being able to read the entire word by putting together the parts that I now have had kind of I've given myself support in reading some of these parts. And then this becomes, as we practice this a lot, it becomes something that's very easy to generalize. I see a new multisyllabic word that I've never read before and right away I know, well, I know that part at the beginning. I know that that says the example you gave for multisyllabic. I know that says multi. Okay, so I know that. Oh, I see at the end it says ick. So now I just need to figure out what's happening in the middle and say this whole word. So it gives me a lot. It gives me a lot of information that I may not have been attuned to before when I first saw this big word in front of me.
Jessica Toste:And then the last is doing a variety of different approaches to practicing, kind of combining affixes and word parts to read words. So this can be done like just a structured practice with reading lists. It can also be done in a variety of kind of engaging games that just give us like a quick pace practice to take a prefix and add a base word to it and then read the whole word. Take a suffix, add a base word to it, read the whole word and then you can switch out as well. So I often think folks who are listening, who have used like foundational skills programs, you think about when you're teaching students short vowel sounds and you may have reviewed all the short vowel sounds and then you're now getting into the early decoding and you have the consonants P and T and so you show them P-A-T, p-a-t, and you say, well, what happens if I take out the A and you move away that letter and I put in a I? Now what word is it? P-i-t? So I do the same.
Jessica Toste:I teach kind of as I'm changing one piece of this word. It gives me all this information on how to pronounce the new word. Same thing is true about multisyllabic words. If I have preheat, okay, I can say preheat successfully. What happens if I take out heat and I add in own pre-own? What happens if I take out own and add in another word vent, prevent? So it's a similar approach. You're kind of scaling it up and supporting students and understanding that they have a lot of approaches already to do this. They just need support in transferring that and generalizing it to bigger parts first of all, and more complex things happening within these words. That's the very scientific way of saying it. The more complex thing.
Melissa:And I know that like these little, these games where you have students build words with different parts of the words, it can be really fun for students. I feel like it's like you know they're playing, they're playing around with words and they get to, like you know, see what works. And and I know that I feel like that's when you see some like aha moments in students and I say students, but honestly, for me too, you know you're oh my gosh that you know that prefix goes with that because it means this and it's like oh, this is so cool. Like it's when I feel like it's when you can get kids to see that, like there's some cool stuff happening in our language.
Jessica Toste:Yeah, absolutely. I mean I always say everybody loves word games. I don't know if that's true that everybody loves them. I guess because I love them a lot. I guess because I love them a lot. But I mean, if you just look at the popularity of Wordle over the last several years, like people generally like word games and so turning things this knowledge that's so important into just like the really cool, fun ways you can play with language and words.
Melissa:Yeah, and one more thing I just wanted to ask you about this morphology. I'm guessing we still need to keep that flexibility, like when we were talking about with the syllables, because even when you were talking about pre, I was thinking, okay, well, what about, like president, you know, like you wouldn't say pre-cident. So I'm imagining you still want to teach students that you know we still have to be flexible here. You might still see those three letters together, but it might not mean it Like, would you agree?
Jessica Toste:Yeah, absolutely.
Jessica Toste:And I think where the flexibility part comes in, this is where it's so important to kind of keep coming back to this idea of being flexible.
Jessica Toste:President's, a great example where a student might see that word and our inclination might be to immediately be like, oh well, that's, you know they, if we're doing a peel off strategy, they might recognize P-R-E strategy.
Jessica Toste:They might recognize P-R-E and our inclination might be to be like, well, that's not a prefix here, that's not being a prefix in this word, which is true. But if they can pull apart that part that P-R-E, say it, then, as they're blending the whole word together, use the sort of flexible vowel strategies that Brennan was talking about earlier, they can get to the right word. So, rather than sort of not give them the extra information anytime they're sort of it's logical to use affixes, but anytime we can sort of chunk parts together as readers in new long words, that helps us get to decoding of the whole word. So I think if they were doing like an explicit morphology routine and they circled P-R-E as a prefix, I might encourage them to sort of say it, blend it, and then say, well, that doesn't sound quite right, let's flex it and see if we can get to the right pronunciation, and then I'd probably add in later to let them know like oh, in this word, pri actually is in a prefix, isn't that interesting?
Melissa:Yeah, that's great. I love bringing together the different routines, so they're not you know they're not separate, they all work together, absolutely, yeah, yeah. And I think we have one more routine which is all about fluency the oral reading fluency routine, and we're excited to hear about this because we talk all the time about how important, you know, repeated reading is and a lot of fluency routines are. So I'm wondering how they tie in with this multisyllabic word reading.
Jessica Toste:Yeah, I mean. So one of the most important parts in reading instruction and then especially in reading intervention for students who have difficulties and need kind of a little bit more of a structured approach to get fluent, is that we're always supporting transfer from you know, letter sounds to words, to connected text, whether that connected text is a sentence or a passage, putting those words into connected text. And then the same is true if we're working on multisyllabic words, focusing on affixes or word parts, whole an extremely important part of becoming a successful reader. So we want students to have opportunities to do that, ideally, opportunities where the teacher will be present and be able to give them suggestions or feedback or corrections as needed. And so using any kind of oral reading fluency practice helps students become more fluent with connected text. It helps them apply what they've learned in more efficient kind of like quick application of those skills, and it gets them more confident sort of transferring the skills they've learned as they move to the things they're going to be reading in class all the time. So when we think about this, we want students to have text, ideally, if we're working on multisyllabic words, text that has a lot of multisyllabic words in it. The difficulty with this is, if a student has a reading disability or dyslexia or they've had struggles, is that sometimes the connected text, the passages we choose for them, match their reading level and as we're making text kind of more easy to access and more easy to read, they tend to have fewer multisyllabic words. And so if you have students who are in intervention and we're choosing passages that match their instructional level, it may have very, very few multisyllabic words in order to keep kind of the readability factor down for them. So in some of our work we've taken text and we've added more multisyllabic words, trying to make sure the text remains readable for them but really gives them as many opportunities as possible to read these complex words in connected text and these routines can look like.
Jessica Toste:You can apply these in a variety of ways. When we're reading passages, commonly you'll select a passage whatever passages you're working with In Word Connections we've written a variety of passages, but you can also use content area text, so from social studies or science or things that are already being used in the classroom and as students dive in, you'll want to kind of pre-select and teach them some keywords that they might need to know and, depending on who your students are. You could select the multi-syllabic words as the keywords that you teach. So these are the words that are going to be a little bit tricky in the text, so let's review them first. You may choose. I commonly will choose keywords that are like the driving, meaningful words of the passage. So you really need to know these words to understand what this passage is all about. Or you might choose a keyword that's just like a really uncommon word, like students probably haven't been reading this word in many other things that they've seen in previous classes, so I'm going to make sure you know what that word is before we dive in.
Jessica Toste:After we pre-teach some keywords, we'll get into reading the text. So, whether it's sentences or passages, you'll want to do some repeated readings of those. So an opportunity for students to read the text at least twice so that they can read through the first time and the second time, have more familiarity with the words. They can focus more on kind of their fluency with reading that text. If it's a passage, they can focus more on their prosody in reading that text. If it's a passage, they can focus more on their prosody in reading that text and it just gives them an opportunity to have more practice, to get more feedback and to become more confident in the way that they're moving into passages which are complex. They're complex and moving from isolated things to big passages, complex and moving from isolated things to big passages.
Jessica Toste:And then the other thing I'd add in if you're reading passages to ask questions at the end, that sort of support like a check for understanding. And if the goal of the instruction right now, like if you're doing a multi-Slavic word reading intervention, you don't want to spend like 10 minutes asking questions and getting into comprehension checks, but you want to always ask questions at the end of reading a passage to make sure students remember the point of reading a passage is to take meaning from it, is to make sure I understand what I'm reading. So even if our goal right now is decoding and fluency and making sure you're reading words accurately, I still want to remind you you should still be making sure that you understand what you're reading as we go. So at the end you can ask a simple question of just like what happened or what was this about? Or did you you know, what do you think was the best part of this story or what was the most interesting thing you learned and those questions are also a good way to link back to word analysis questions so you can get to questions about the keywords that you were talking about before you read, or questions about complex words that you see in the passage.
Jessica Toste:So, like I see this word, like this is a really tricky word. It has it's really long. There's both a prefix and a suffix in this word. Like what was the prefix, what was the suffix? How did you read this word? Like what was the prefix, what was the suffix? How did you read this word? Like, how did you attack reading this word? So it's a good opportunity to bring it back to paying attention to aspects of the words that could have been tricky for them.
Lori:Yeah, I love this idea of thinking about the routines to support and using the routines to support other routines. Right, like, if I'm in one routine and I'm like, oh okay, like now maybe I'm trying to think about the ones you shared, so perhaps I'm starting with the syllabication routine, and then I noticed, oh, I should should be thinking also about that morphology routine. I can bring that in right. So these aren't like necessarily separate, but they can also be used separately. Um, I I want to think about a couple of questions I have. Um, is one routine perhaps more important than the other? I heard you know we started with that essential routine. Is this like, are we starting with that? Is that just one? We want to make sure students have a foundation. Um, should we use a specific routine with certain words? I'm trying to just think about, like as a teacher, just very practically, you know, in my classroom, these practical questions that come to mind. So, brennan, I'm going to turn it over to you. Tell us about these routines.
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, no, that's a great question and we love using routines just in teaching too, because they really can keep instruction snappy, structured, predictable. Students know what to expect, we know what to expect as teachers and we can really stay focused on the learning. And that being said, we can sort of do we can think about like routine stacking in a way too, of like be thinking about logistics of implementing these routines. So for most of these again, these are like the active ingredients in good multisyllabic word reading instruction. When we talk about word connections more, these are all sort of embedded and laid out for you, but it really depends on sometimes the students, the words and also the logistics of the classroom. You're in, that essential skills routine really is essential and it's a couple minute warmup for kids and a lot of kids, even some adults right, is essential and it's a couple minute warmup for kids and a lot of kids, even some adults right when we're spelling, kind of to exercise all these variant correspondence that we have. So we can probably spare a couple minutes to add in that essential skills routine. And then there's some similarities with the morphology routine and the syllabication routine and so both of those are sort of attack, the peel off strategies kind of close to that, that eshlav or every syllable has at least one vowel. We peel off meaningful parts on that routine too, and so when I think about those routines and those, those word attack strategies, we can think then about the words, and so some words might be better suited for that syllabication or every syllable has at least one vowel routine when students don't know the word or it doesn't have easily recognizable morphemes, and so we can focus on then breaking that into pronounceable chunks, so like words like relevant or a volcano those don't have a lot of like high utility morphemes we're going to be teach. So I might use that routine and do like a strategy sort of five to 10 minute session on this with those types of words with syllabication. But when we think about words like reconstruction or transportation, we'll probably lean into more of that, just that peel off strategy there. But so we can think about those two the morphology and syllabication kind of interchangeable, thinking about your students, thinking about the kinds of words you're using.
Brennan Chandler:We have a lot of research showing how incredible and important morphology and morphological awareness is, and so I'd rather lean on that a lot more because it is transferable. Think about science and social studies and all these words they're coming into that have those morphines in them. But really one we don't want to sort of throw the wayside is the oral reading fluency. So, like Jess said, we want them to transfer and generalize all the knowledge they're learning at that connected text level. It's really, really important for them to generalize that knowledge, to get feedback in real time from a teacher not independent reading Right, they're there, they're with you, you can see how they are applying these strategies in connected text and sort of you can prompt them through that and so we shouldn't be scared of that part.
Brennan Chandler:We really want to make sure that's there and there's so many easy ways, as I just talked about, we can kind of make sure that can be embedded across content areas too. You can come up with in Word Connections. We have some really fun passages that we use with kids that are question-answer format, that are really high interest, and so we want to make sure that we're giving them access some of that, some of that stretch text and that's not purely decodable that they have had often in their foundational phonics program. That's very, very controlled. We want them. You know these words are a little different, right, we're not going to. We're not going to know every single word. We want them to sort of stretch their reading muscles so they become these flexible, strategic decoders when they read, when they encounter these words in text.
Lori:Yeah, that's really helpful. I feel like often you know you mentioned highlighting the importance of morphology Often morphology is tricky when we're teaching it because there's so much involved. You have to do pre-work as a teacher and I often find myself asking myself okay, what part of this is, is the morphology part that I want to teach? And then is it actually going to work all the way through right? So, like taking myself through the routine that you, you shared, brennan, can this word take us through the routine? I'm trying to think of a word because I think sometimes I go back and forth between a morphology routine and a syllabication routine to figure out if the word is one that can be used in that specific routine. Am I making sense? I feel like it's a struggle as a teacher.
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, no, I think you make a lot of sense. And what I'll say too to teachers is that I always want to go for clarity over linguistic precision. So we talk about is this a morpheme in this word, actually A clear morpheme? Is it a part of the base? We can really be flexible ourselves in that. I think, teaching kids how to be flexible readers, we have to model a lot of flexibility ourselves, and so we don't need to be linguists ourselves really to go over, go, go for clarity over that linguistic precision.
Brennan Chandler:If you think there are some highly transparent morphemes in the word, like photosynthesis, maybe, right, that might be a good one. But if you're like asking yourself, eh, maybe you go for the syllabication, maybe they peel off parts they know, right, so, um, I don't think we should. Um, we don't have to think soup, we don't have to think, we don't have to like get out, you know, go on, get a textbook, go through all these sort of things about was this a morpheme? Is it's not, is it derivational, inflectional, um, that's why programs can be so great too, because you can just pick one up and use it and kind of helps you through that.
Brennan Chandler:But, um, when in doubt, kind of, go with your gut and don't think we don't need to think too hard about on this, because it's going to trip kids up too if we're thinking about oh, is this the? Yeah, I don't know if this is a morpheme, is it? I don't know. So just be flexible and go for clarity whenever possible. I think is a good. It's a good, probably, way to be with a lot of these things here.
Jessica Toste:Yeah, I would add. Britton said it really well. I would add to kind of Melissa asked about like the word president before and like pre is not a prefix there, and I think what I was talking about there is kind of goes into the answer that Brennan just gave. This idea of our goal here is for students to become efficient readers so that they can then put their effort into making sense of the passage and getting knowledge and information from the text that they're reading. And so there's there's a little bit of a trade off and it's hard. Like I am for sure a word nerd. I am trained as a teacher and delivering very explicit phonics programs.
Jessica Toste:I love getting into like I'm like let me talk to you for 10 minutes about this like linguistic concept that I think is so cool in all of these words. But I mean they're not taking a linguistics exam at the end of their fifth grade year, right? They just need to be able to read these words to understand and to gain knowledge and to be able to read content area text. And so there's a trade-off. Sometimes, especially if you have knowledge or and if you're gaining all this linguistics knowledge, feels really hard to not just like say it out loud. You really want to.
Jessica Toste:You really want to explain things, but sometimes there's a trade-off of like is that the best use of our instructional time right now? Is that going to help them understand how to apply this in future? Or is just being able to read a word part flex it to get to a proper pronunciation? Is that going to be an effective way for them to get you know to reading multi-Slavic words? I often will like err on the side of simplicity and clarity, like Brennan mentioned, and then, as students are learning more, you can kind of drop in little tidbits as well too. Like you know, you're erring on the side of simplicity and clarity to get students efficient in reading these words, and then you can add other pieces of knowledge as well, like oh, by the way, like this is a suffix here, or you know this, whatever, whatever rule that you know that they don't necessarily have to memorize and think about all the time, but you can add in as a little other piece of information that might be helpful for them.
Lori:Yeah, that's so helpful. I often find myself saying things very generally, especially to older kids, like oh, that's neat, I noticed this isn't that neat, and just pointing it and moving on, because it seems to just be very efficient, And're rolling their eyes anyway right At some point. So well, at least my own child is, so I'll speak for myself my own teenagers.
Melissa:Yeah, this is all amazing and you read my mind when you were talking about middle school students, because throughout this whole time I actually taught middle school and high school. So, as you all were talking about it, I was like this is the support my students needed. Like they needed this multi-syllabic word reading support, but there was never any time. I mean, I was lucky if I had more than 45 minutes with my students myself and there was never any intervention, blocks or extra support times really built in. And so I'm just wondering if are there any like? Do you all have any tips? I think, brendan, you might have some of how we can like fit this kind of instruction into a day for students in middle and high school.
Brennan Chandler:Yeah, definitely, but sort of before I get there, I want to piggyback that, like these foundational skills, really they don't have an expiration date, and so if students can't read the words, they're not going to read the text, and so even trying to talk to your administrator or anybody you know, at the district level too, about getting some some districts call it now the middle and high school level like wind time or any sort of RTI intervention time, is going to be helpful. When we were all talking, I thought about this, this study that Freddie Hebert did in 2022 and estimated that about 80% of the kids who score below proficient on our national exam of reading really have difficulties with this multi-Slavic word reading, and so 80% would probably benefit from a lot of the stuff that we talked about today that aren't meeting that proficient level. Aren't meeting that proficient level. But right now, the reality is time. Is this limited commodity in the upper elementary secondary grades, which is often what we find to be a really big barrier to implementation, is time. I mean, we're looking at some word connections, data right now, and it's like it really is all about the time to implement, and so we can think of these two as sort of like an MTSS model, Like, let's say, like core, our tier one instruction, tier two and even really tier three. But we can think flexibly and fit some of these routines even into like core instruction.
Brennan Chandler:And so I was actually last year working with a teacher closely who had a large amount of students struggle on the state reading test I think 45% of her students. She taught seventh grade ELA, middle school, just classroom teacher didn't meet state level proficiency and so, and she didn't have a dedicated intervention block, and so we kind of workshopped and wove some of these routines into her ELA lessons and so she had a 45 minute block every day with these students. We said, okay, that's seven to 10 minutes of the day that we can sort of use some of these routines to support them. And I remember that the novel she was working to was a long walk to water. And so we kind of we looked at the week, thought about some of the students skill profiles and they really a lot of them did struggle with the word reading. And so, for example, on Monday we're like all right, let's do like a quick morphology Monday, let's pull some morphemes from that week's reading of the text. Let's say like on instruct, spend some time breaking them down with students before reading, kind of just teaching them explicitly. Here's some morphemes we're going to see. Here's sort of okay, they kind of built their own affix bank in a way of their I think they have like an interactive ELA notebook. They kind of jotted the affixes down so that way when they read the text that day and they hit some of those more themes, it kind of it kind of unpacked them a little bit. Right, it's not, it's sort of a class wide intervention. So at this point it's not like super targeted, but it kind of helped them, support them in breaking down some of these big words and it was connected to the content, which is really really helpful. And so we did that on Monday.
Brennan Chandler:We had a couple of days where we had the syllabication. It was like a five to 10 minute just strategy session, sort of. Here's what we do when we come to a big word we don't know. Provided them like with a list of words, kind of practice that whole class. But really the key, the nice thing about the routines is you're not going to spend a ton. You don't need to spend a ton of time on really any of them, right, and so we can kind of think about how to customize and put these in when we have like a bell ringer or at the end of class and we have some time to sort of hit on these things as well.
Brennan Chandler:The last thing I'll say I remember Friday we did like a fluency Friday she had, you know, she kind of partnered students up with text, thinking about like peer assisted reading, so how they would one would be the reader, one would be the coach.
Brennan Chandler:They would switch, you know, and kind of prompt each other and use some of these strategies we talked about, like, oh, let's make it a real word, make it a word.
Brennan Chandler:You know that you've heard before type of thing and so it's not perfect but we can sort of integrate some of these into core, Even thinking about word connections and adapting.
Brennan Chandler:That may be supplemental in these grades. Like, maybe, if you are a special ed teacher at the middle or high school levels which is a lot of the teachers I work with that are in the graduate program I work with are special ed teachers in the middle and secondary level and are often required to do more of a co-teaching situation or push-in and so teaching them and providing them ways to how to kind of adapt if you have 20 or 30 minutes and how to sort of just adapt a program like Word Connections. Pull a group to the back of the, to the back table in the class, do a lesson or half a lesson with them and pick it up the next day and sort of rotate. That way Really can be done. The key it really is thinking flexibly and then really thinking as you get kids that really do struggle all right, what are their actual skill deficits and what's the most efficient way that we can get them access to these words that we know are really important to read.
Lori:I feel like this episode. I'm going to have to listen to it myself at least three to five times. This is pure gold. As we come to a close here, I'm curious if there's anything you'd like to just very briefly leave our listeners with about reading multi-syllabic words. Just some final thoughts, sure.
Jessica Toste:I mean, I think to me one of the most important things that I talk about is just recognizing that students do need this continued instruction in the intermediate grades and beyond that.
Jessica Toste:These words present new and different challenges than they've seen in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, as they've sort of been developing early reading skills and we generally assume that as we've become efficient in reading those words in the primary grades, that if students have not had any difficulty or they've responded really well to intervention, that now they're going to transition very easily into reading multisyllabic words and more complex words. And I think it's really important to recognize that students in the upper elementary grades need instruction to understand how to be flexible with these words and that students who have difficulties are going to need continued intervention to help them be flexible. And making sure that students, especially those who have been in intervention for many years, not keeping them in foundational skills programs because they seem to not yet be totally fluent. So if we do assessments their fluency is not where we want it to be and a lot of times we keep those students in foundational skills interventions without recognizing that sometimes they know most of those skills.
Brennan Chandler:What they need now are strategies to help them kind of bridge forward into other kinds of words yeah, and I'll say it one more time because we haven't said enough this entire episode but flexibility really is the key for teachers, for us to model I think really important and the students, because in the real world, when we're reading these big words, they don't play by the rules and really our students need more than one way to land one rule, one strategy. We have to be flexible as teachers ourselves.
Lori:Well, thank you both so much. We couldn't have asked for a better conversation with such practical advice. Thank you both so much for being here with us and our listeners.
Brennan Chandler:Thank you.
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