Making Sense of Multisyllabic Words with Don Compton & Laura Steacy

Episode 255

Experts Don Compton & Laura Steacy explore the complexities of multisyllabic word reading and the decoding challenges older readers encounter, especially those with dyslexia. They discuss how readers navigate complex words using different decoding strategies, the role of morphology and “set for variability” in reading development, and how tools like the DELP database help predict word difficulty. The episode offers practical insights into supporting literacy development and improving instruction for struggling readers.

Resources 

• D-ELP Tool 
• FCRR Student Center Activities 

Looking for more literacy support and resources? Explore all of our podcast episodes, free listening guides, and classroom tools at literacypodcast.com.

Interested in bringing Melissa & Lori Love Literacy to your school or event? Email us at literacypodcast@greatminds.org.

Transcript

Why Longer Words Trip Kids

Lori 0:00

Some students seem solid reading single-syllable words, but then they run into a longer word and everything falls apart. Multisyllabic words are often where reading becomes significantly more complex, and students usually need much more support than we expect.

Melissa 0:16

Today we're joined by researchers and professors Don Compton and Laura Stacy. They help us understand what's really going on with multisyllabic words and what you can do to better support your students.

Lori 0:29

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 0:39

We worked together in Baltimore when the district adopted a new literacy curriculum.

Lori 0:44

We realized there was so much more to learn about how to teach reading and writing. Lori and I can't wait to keep learning with you today. Hi, Don and Laura. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

Don Compton 1:02

Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Melissa 1:03

So we're really excited to talk to you all about multisyllabic words. And I know, like I I just reflected back on my sixth grade classroom, where this is something that definitely came up because I always had kids, most of my students, you know, they they could read. You know, it wasn't like they were struggling to read all the way around. Like they were reading, but then they would always hit words, you know, every sentence or so, every paragraph or so, they'd hit a word. And then sometimes some kids would just look at me like, can you tell me what this word is? Or like some of them would just guess at the word, and you're like, that was not not the word. Um, and it was hard for me to know exactly what was going on there, you know, because I'm like, well, you know, I can't just say like they didn't learn phonics. They should have learned something they didn't learn. Like they did, they had a lot of skills there, but there was something about these like tougher words that I didn't know enough about. So can let's start there and talk about like the words themselves. When we get to those longer words, what makes those words more challenging? And like, what are the actual features of these words that make it so hard for students?

Laura Steacy 2:10

Yeah, absolutely.

What Makes Complex Words Hard

Laura Steacy 2:12

And as you mentioned, it's sort of inevitable that children are going to encounter these words, especially when they get into the older grades. And not only are they required to read these words, they're expected to make meaning from text that is very dense in terms of having a lot of these words in text. And so there are a lot of unique challenges that come along with longer words and things around like syllable boundaries, stress patterns in multisyllabic words, um, vowel ambiguities that kind of come along for the ride as uh as words get longer, and other kinds of transparency. So transparency at the sort of like letter-sound correspondence level and irregularities that we see in monosyllabic words and in multisyllabic words, but in um complex, morphologically complex words, there's also um morphological transparency that we've seen in our work as being a really important kind of word feature related to how difficult these words are for children. And so in our work and some work that we've done with Devin Kearns, we found that this morphological transparency is particularly important. So if we just take a few examples here, like the word greatness, we can see the base word great in greatness, and we can also hear it. So when we go from great to greatness, there's not much change there when we add that suffix. But if we take an example like going from magic to magician, the spelling of magic stays the same, but we have what's referred to as a phonological shift, where the the sound of the base word changes when we go to magician. And then if we take another example of going from nature to natural, we have both a change in the spelling and a change in the pronunciation of the base word nature. So that has both a more uh, excuse me, a phonological and an orthographic shift. And our work suggests that those words that contain one or more of those shifts are particularly challenging for children as they go to read.

Don Compton 4:30

Well we also kind of come across this phenomenon where some of the suffixes start to get quite complex in their pronunciations, um, like you know, IO uh IOU S or something like that. And these are very difficult for kids because they don't see them enough and they don't know them. And so it just adds complexity to the to the decoding piece. And so we tend not to use the word multisyllabic words, whereas I think that's a pretty common uh uh term for this. We tend to call them complex words because that allows us to think about morphology and um syllables and and just all sorts of kind of strange uh uh graphing sequences and those kind of things that are not only set by the syllable.

Lori 5:20

I have to ask, do you say complex or complex?

Don Compton 5:26

That's a good question. I usually say I think I say complex. Yeah. Although I like, I sort of like the shift in complex.

Lori 5:35

You can just toss it in there every now and again.

Don Compton 5:37

Yeah, it sounds a bit more exotic.

Lori 5:39

It does. So okay, so that's kind of what about the word, right? But I want to think about the student for a moment. So what changes for students as readers? When they get stuck on those words, right? Maybe they see the word uh I liked your example of nature to natural, because it does uh adjust for that spelling and pronunciation. So when students are getting stuck on a word like natural, they're what happens? Why are they getting stuck?

Morphology Shifts That Raise Difficulty

Don Compton 6:05

Yeah, that's a great question. So let me start by um talking about what happens with students. So in typical development and word reading, kids start with kind of very rudimentary um ideas and knowledge about the alphabetic principle and our writing system. And so they tend to use a very simplistic kind of decoding skills. And over time, as kids uh get more experience, learn more through instruction, read more words, um, they start to develop more um intuitive knowledge of the orthographic phonological links in words and start using larger pieces that people would call chunks. And those chunks can be rhyme units, they can be um syllables, they can be morphemes, um, and these are called different grain sizes. And as kids get better at reading, they are able to use larger grain sizes. And so sounding out the word natural um letter by letter, it's very hard to end up with anything that's close to the word natural. But seeing uh parts of the word that represent nature and AL, um, it's much easier to chunk those and recognize those. So these larger chunks, um morphemes and syllables and rhyme units, tend to be um decoding anchors to help the kids see parts of words and naturally chunk pieces. And we call these um word-by-child interactions. So, in order to read a complex word write, um, there's certain um requirements that you know about the word, and kids bring certain knowledge to that word. And when those two match, the kids can can pretty well um work that out, work out the the pronunciation, as long as they they have an oral representation for the word. When there's a mismatch between what the child knows and what's needed for the the reading of the word, then you start getting into um these other strategies, guessing, uh, trying to use context and those kind of things. And so our job is to help kids get through this natural progression where they start to develop this understanding of how these mappings work at all different sorts of grain sizes, and then to be able to apply those when they get to a new word in a way that at least gets them close enough that they can recognize the word from either being in context or recognize it in their oral language.

Lori 8:45

Yeah. And I'm thinking about what they need to do differently, right? Like if I came into and I could read nature, but I was struggling with natural, what might I need to do differently in order to be successful getting to natural from nature? Because I appreciate that uh idea of the decoding anchors, right? In that case, would my decoding anchor be nature?

Laura Steacy 9:08

I think it could be both. So it would be both like knowledge of the base word there and being able to use that to help you get to the word natural from a semantic standpoint, but also knowledge of the suffix there as well is important. So, as Don mentioned, it's sort of like what children need to do differently when they encounter these kinds of words is use all these different knowledge sources, all of the knowledge of at many different grain size levels. So bring knowledge of affixes, bring knowledge of base words, bring GPC like graphene phoneme correspondence knowledge, but also bring knowledge of larger units. And children really, uh, I think to be successful at reading novel, complex words, need to kind of be able to bring all of those things together and also know when they need to do that.

Don Compton 10:05

Right. And and if kids are reading in text, they are in a process of building meaning, which means they are in a kind of a confirmational type of headspace to where when they get to natural, assuming that the context makes sense to them, if they if they get some priming of that looks like nature, natural should come from both semantics and syntax, such that they've got this confirmation within this reading, within reading of the sentence that natural is right there. So it's it's a it's it's only when they don't have enough to get close to where those net those I didn't want to use natural because we're talking about that those processes don't lead to confirmation that they're they're not close enough to get to natural. Then they start guessing and doing things that we don't want them to do. Well, we want the decoding process to be kind of giving that bottom-up uh uh information about the word and also some top-down processing from the sentence that that uh relies on semantics and syntax and other things like that.

Lori 11:13

Yeah. Okay. So from what I'm hearing is there's a lot of things that come together here. It's

How Skilled Readers Use Chunks

Lori 11:18

not just one thing or one part, and that these uh grain sizes are really important for students to have knowledge of so that they can kind of deploy them as they need them. Is that accurate?

Don Compton 11:30

Yeah, that's really accurate. That's exactly what they we want them to have a repertoire. Um and in some cases, they may be naturally choosing those, but in general, we want kids to um automatically deploy these in a way that uh works best for when they're reading the words that are less familiar to them.

Melissa 11:50

All right. So I'm I'm sitting here thinking like this feels like potentially a lot of things for kids to have to like do as they're reading in their heads. But one of the things I'm thinking about is the idea, Don, you kind of like touched on it already, but this idea of like just being flexible seems like probably one of the biggest things that they have to learn how to do is just like, it's it's okay if it's not right the first time. Like, you gotta keep trying it. And I'm pretty sure this fits in with what we we've talked about before on our podcast called Set for Variability. Um, so can you guys talk a little bit about Set for Variability and what that is and how that fits with everything we've been talking about already?

Laura Steacy 12:29

Yeah, absolutely. So um one kind of important piece here is the idea of like partial decoding, which is what we want children to do when they're reading, even if a word is not completely regular. And this becomes particularly important with these longer, more complex words, where children will engage in partial decoding and they might get close to a pronunciation that they know. And so when we think about set for variability and correcting those pronunciations using all of the knowledge that they bring to the task, um, that is particularly important here because there are potentially more sources of um ambiguity. And so when they engage in partial decoding, um this is sort of where set for variability would come in in terms of correcting those mispronunciations that they would land on.

Don Compton 13:31

Right. And so um English has a lot of places where you just can't be accurate. Even a word like above, um, we don't we don't the the the A there is a schwa, so we don't really know what that is. So you can either say it's an above or above. Neither of those are right, but most kids, if they get that close, they'll be like, oh, that's above, right?

Lori 13:55

Yeah, that's a good point.

Don Compton 13:57

Yeah. And the schwa's are all over the place, as are, as are other irregularities. So it would be unfair to um expect kids to learn all of the variations. Um and so part of this is just a problem-solving piece that that you know, if they've been taught that things don't always sound exactly like you pronounce them, and just kind of think about what it might be, and then use some kind of confirmation strategy that, yeah, that makes sense there. Um then I think you can get a long way on that. And that would, that was the the whole idea, you know, Dick Vineski in a long time ago was arguing against sort of at the time people who said, don't teach phonics because it doesn't work. And he's like, but yeah, actually it does work. It's just you need a set for variability in order for it to work and make sense, without saying that all rules have to work for all words.

Melissa 14:52

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was thinking that. It's like, I feel like we hear that a lot. Like, well, English is just like crazy. So don't like just throw everything out the window.

Don Compton 15:00

Right. It's less crazy than you think, actually. Um, the it's the vowels are really complicated. That that's where most of it it is. So, Laura, do you want to say anything more? Uh our our colleague J Jay uh Rickel calls Laura the queen of set for variability. Laura, do you want to be a little bit more?

Lori 15:17

Oh, I didn't know we had a queen of uh set for variability in our midst. I would love to hear from it.

Don Compton 15:22

He anointed her.

Laura Steacy 15:26

Well, we've we've ended up doing quite a lot of work on set for variability.

Don Compton 15:30

We did. We did. And and purely as a uh a byproduct of in our first grant, we just threw a measure in there for because we thought it might be interesting in a certain way, which it wasn't, but then we started to get this data that was really helpful in us thinking about it. So uh for viewers or listeners, uh, the set for variability field is quite complicated. So um I think helping kids think about while they're reading words to be flexible and and think about sort of different ways to pronounce things and come to it, that makes a lot of sense. It's a lot harder to think about whether we should be teaching decontextualized set for variability, thinking that it's going to help kids word read. The the jury's still out on that one. So um I think I think teaching kids that there's variation in the in the way we represent the language through writing and having them be flexible is it does them a great service.

Melissa 16:27

Yeah, that's actually what I was wondering. I was thinking back to my like my students who either mispronounced the word or just looked at me for the word. Um do you have suggestions for teachers, like what when those things happen, if they say the wrong word or they look to you and want you to help, um, what's the like what's the best way to respond to that to get to this flexibility versus just like telling them the word and it keeps going?

Laura Steacy 16:53

I I think that's a great, a great question and um and a challenge that comes along with just learning to read in English. And so I think encouraging children to think about what the word might be is important, as Don mentioned.

Set For Variability And Partial Decoding

Laura Steacy 17:10

Um and to not promote guessing, but uh to help them to use all of the information that's at their disposal. So first looking at the information that's available to them at the word level and using all of the information there. So I mentioned partial decoding, and so um because oftentimes there are irregularities in English, but if we think of a given word, there are also a lot of regularities, even within a word, that has irregularities in it. Um, so using all that information that's at their disposal, but then also the information that's available at the sentence level as well to help them figure out what that word is. So using the word level knowledge and then also using kind of the feedback from the sentence level, if they get close to something, may help them to arrive at the correct pronunciation. I think another important piece of kind of this, like needing all of this knowledge to bring to the task of reading complex words, is the importance of uh kind of a metacognitive piece as well. So um I'll just sort of uh refer to a program here. So Maureen Lovett's FAST program, as it's known in the literature, it's also known as Empower in the field, kind of has multiple word identification strategies that children can bring to the task of reading words and multisyllabic words. So knowledge of um rhymes, um, knowledge of um affixes, and also a strategy for dealing with ambiguous vowels, the vowel alert strategy. Um, so all of those strategies are taught explicitly, but then there's a metacognitive piece that helps students to know when to use which strategy to set them up for success, to be able to apply these when they encounter them in text. And so I think that piece is pretty important as well. And we've done some work with Maureen on looking at the effect of these different strategies. And the vowel alert strategy is particularly important when children are asked to read words that contain variable vowels. And that's important because in the larger kind of corpus of English words that children will encounter, there are a lot that include either a schwa, a reduced vowel, or some kind of variable vowel like EA.

Melissa 19:42

And I just wanted to stamp one thing that Don, you said earlier, which was the importance of these words being in their oral vocabulary in order to do this. Can you all just talk a little bit about that?

Don Compton 19:52

Yeah, it's pretty unrealistic to ask a child to be flexible to come up with the word that's in their heads, that the word's not in their head. Um, so um that's part of um part of how we can help kids also understand is is ask them, does that make sense? Do you know that word? It's really easy for to think of this for English language learners. So, you know, they're gonna pronounce, they're gonna all the kids are gonna laugh at them in the lunch line because they're not gonna pronounce baloney right. They're gonna decode it, they're gonna know it's something to eat, but they're not gonna say it right. And so asking them to land on the right pronunciation because they don't know what baloney is um is unrealistic. And so this sort of speaks to this idea that we need to get early vocabulary into kids' heads so that when they do encounter words, they can match that spelling pattern to um the phonology and the meaning, and that the phonology and meaning are already in their heads. And so that's why there's such a push to get word meanings and word pronunciations into kids' heads early on so that they have those to then match them to the spelling.

Lori 21:09

Yeah, Don, you're saying something, and I was um trying to come up with some examples here. Like even if I'm not right an English language learner and I'm decoding a word. I mean, but especially if I am learning English, this is exceptionally hard. There are words like, you know, for example, if we looked at the word um conduct, that's your behavior, right? But if we put a different stress on that word, which is conduct, that means to lead. So there's even words that I might have heard before, but that I have a completely different mental model of their meaning and don't maybe I've not, you know, understood the other version of that with the different stress, and maybe I've never heard that. Um so there's a lot here that I think we really need to support that oral language vocabulary. That's so, so important. Important because if again, if they come across it and they don't have it, they it's just like there's nothing. So we have to give it to them then, right?

Don Compton 22:07

And and yeah. And the other thing is we can't expect oral language to to teach kids all these different meanings, multiple meanings and different meanings of words. They have to get it through text because our oral language is not rich enough when we're talking to kids. Like, how often do we say in a in a brief enough encounter where they would hear conduct versus conduct in a way that they would be like, hey, wait a minute. Those sounds so yeah, right. So one of the things that we're always talking about is we're teaching kids to learn how to read in order for reading to provide them with so many more experiences with words and other experiences such that they can start building this repertoire, which you really can't do through just oral language alone. Um, you know, there was a there's a great study back uh in the old days by uh Ann Cunningham and Keith Stanovich that they looked at uh first-grade basal readers, the complexity of words in that versus typical types of conversations that um adults have. And the only place where there are more rare words than a first-grade basal reader is things like courtrooms or scientific presentations. So um we've got to get kids into text because this is where they're gonna learn about the language, along with uh all sorts of background knowledge and those kind of things. So it's really critical that we we give kids what they need to start becoming successful in text. And one of those things is a set for variability.

Lori 23:46

It is. I think another one of those things is teaching them about, you know, the words themselves and like morphology, right? You mentioned that earlier. So as words kind of get more complex, and see what I did there, I used the other version. And meaning and word parts, they play a bigger role. How can teachers use morphology to support students with these, you know, more I was gonna say more complex words, but I already said that, these longer words.

Don Compton 24:12

That's a great question. Uh I think you're starting to see, I'm sure, through your podcast, that morphology is starting to uh become um much more talked about. Um so morphology, for those who don't know, is the the smallest unit of meaning in the language. Um it's represented both in our oral language and in our written language. And we have to be careful about sort of the oral language system and the reading system. Um we use morphology in our oral language and don't really think about morphological structure um that much, I don't think. But in learning to read, we have uh orthography to phonology connections that are at the morpheme, and we also have orthography to semantic connections that are at the level of morpheme. And so while kids use morphemes in their oral language all the time, the words with multiple morphemes, those kind of things, they they also have knowledge of syntax on how to add certain morphemes to keep the syntax correct and all those kind of things. Where they start to learn more about morphemes is when they start to learn to read and write. And so I think teachers pointing out um the spelling of morphemes, um, how these spellings then map onto meaning across words, that's where you're going to get some bang for your buck in terms of helping kids understand that these morphological units are spelled pretty, pretty um consistently, they have consistent meaning across words. And this is part of building that morphological grain size when kids are learning to read and spell, which um allows them then to transfer some of that knowledge onto new words that they've never seen before. So while I think teaching kids the meaning of morphological units, oftentimes that takes the place, uh takes the form of teaching uh suffixes and base words and those kind of things, building in time to practice how the written language expresses those and how that uh those spelling patterns map onto both

Teacher Moves When Kids Get Stuck

Don Compton 26:28

phonology and onto the meaning semantics is really important. And um, teachers who do that are really helping kids to have a skill that then will transfer to new words and new situations in a way that uh hopefully is generative for them.

Lori 26:45

Yeah, I want to just talk about something that Laura mentioned earlier and just ask a genuine question about it. So, Laura, you talked about that idea of partial decoding. And I'm assuming that here we can use a morpheme, right? To because Don, you said the great one of the grain sizes were morphemes. So we can use morphemes to help with the decoding. So can you say more about that? Like how is that just really helpful? And how does it help students in multiple ways, more than just the word in front of them?

Laura Steacy 27:16

Yeah, sure. Um yeah, I think that the morphological knowledge is important. And as John said, we can think about morphology in both kind of the oral language domain as well as the print domain. And knowledge of morphemes can be seen as something that's generative, right? So having knowledge of a particular morpheme allows you access to new words that contain that morpheme if you know the base word already. And then that gives you access to knowledge of what the word means, as well as will help you decode it if you if you think of that morpheme as an orthographic unit. So um it's sort of another piece of knowledge to bring to this to this task and helps to make these um morphologically complex words more manageable. So if you take off the affixes that you already know, the prefixes and suffixes, that can really help to then make that word a lot more manageable. Perhaps you already know the base word, and so you just have to put those pieces together, or you can focus your efforts on the base word and decoding that word and dealing with any kind of ambiguities that might happen in there. But then the morphological knowledge can help to make the whole thing a little bit more manageable.

Don Compton 28:38

Right. So think about um, you know, kids, kids are starting to learn how to read um two-syllable words. And and one thing that helps them is T-URE is a pretty natural uh part of a word. It says chure. It's so that allows you then pretty quickly, and once you've talked a little bit about to kids about maybe open and closed syllables, you can get to nature. Um, and then knowing nature, if you know something about morphology, you can get to natural, you can go to unnatural, you can go unnaturally. There's all sorts of then ways to to give kids practice at new words, but that solidify that, oh, I see, I still see nature in that word. And I see all of these other parts that then I can start saying, oh, I know natural. What would unnatural be? And the un is UN. And so we get this sort of building of knowledge that then um when you go to unrealistic, once they start learning the realistic, they can get to unrealistic, unrealistically, all these types of things that just kind of balloons sort of what they can what they can attack in terms of words.

Lori 29:48

Yeah, which is just so helpful. I mean, I feel like teachers are always looking for efficient ways to attack attack word reading, attack word learning. So this feels very efficient.

Dyslexia And The Limits Of Memorizing

Lori 29:59

One thing I do want to talk about before we uh kind of move on to our next part is I want to think about how this kind of picture changes for students with dyslexia, right? They're a really important group of students, and and I know that longer words are often more complicated for them. Um, so what do we need to understand about how students with dyslexia might process these more complex words?

Laura Steacy 30:26

Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that we have found in our work on kind of looking at the development of reading over time in children who have dyslexia and typically developing children is that oftentimes when we compare development in real word reading to development in decoding skills, um, we see pretty similar growth in typically developing uh students on both of those skills. Whereas in children with dyslexia, oftentimes we'll see that they're they add real words to their lexicons over time and development, but they don't add the decoding skills that we would expect to kind of come online as well. So they're kind of storing full words in their lexicons without developing that decoding and phonics knowledge and kind of sub-lexical knowledge that they need to read words. And then when we get into these more complex words and less frequent words, that strategy becomes stressed, right? Because we can't learn all of those words as just single units and just store all of them. We need to be able to use the sub-lexical knowledge at all of these different grain sizes to attack these words. And children with dyslexia oftentimes just don't have that knowledge to apply to these longer words.

Don Compton 31:58

Yeah, so it it ends up they have one grain size they can do, which is the whole word. They're just memorizing each word as its own piece. They're not bringing all these other grain sizes to bear. And so it uh it becomes more and more of a problem as you move move along developmentally.

Lori 32:15

So do do you do we teach, do we continue to teach them and have them pull apart words? Like is the like is the fix-it strategy, right? So to kind of make them aware, like you might be seeing this word and you might be trying to remember it as a whole thing, and that's really crazy. You can't do that for every word. Let's pull it apart. Let's let's think about our like how we can attack this in little bits. I don't know, I'm just making it up on the spot. You two are the experts, but um just would love to hear from you is is the next step there, like, hey, we we I can help you with this, right?

Laura Steacy 32:48

Yeah. And I think that particularly for children with dyslexia, taking kind of a systematic, explicit approach to introducing these units and supporting them in terms of knowing when to apply that knowledge in longer words is really important. So, as you say, like helping them to know, like we need to break this down and we need to draw on what we already know about different parts of words, and we need to use that knowledge to apply to these longer words and to kind of promote looking deeper within the word for things that they already know and build that knowledge kind of intentionally over the course of instruction to set them up for success with that, knowing that children with dyslexia will likely need more exposures to those things, more opportunities for practice, um, really um specific uh feedback throughout the process, as well as kind of metacognitive support and how to kind of put all of this together.

Don Compton 33:53

Right. But it's also important to know that these kids chose that strategy because that's what worked best for them. You know, this basically trying to memorize each word. Breaking that strategy is hard. And so just teaching them the letter sounds and say, okay, you have the building blocks, now stop doing that is not enough. You actually have to, in sort of systematic structured way, um, teach kids about the basic building blocks, and then you're gonna have to give them experiences and chances and knowledge about each of those grain sizes in order to instill those, because you're basically rebuilding a process that was skipped. It's something that needs to be well thought out, well planned, and there's all sorts of resources out there for doing this. And if you're somebody who thinks that you have children that need that, seek out the experts. They they can really help you with how to sequence what order to go in, how much feedback, how long, how to make sure kids are learning, how to make sure they're using the right um strategies at the right time. So it's um it's not guesswork.

The DELP Word Difficulty Database

Melissa 35:06

So speaking of resources, we're gonna change gears a little here, but you all developed a really great resource for teachers, and we wanted to talk about it a little bit, share a little bit about it. Um, but it's called the Delp database, which stands for Developmental English Lexicon Project. Um, but we're gonna like walk through it a little bit, but before we even do that, can you just give a little intro and tell teachers what it even is?

Don Compton 35:34

Yeah. So let me start by this is a project that was funded by the National Institute of Health through NICHD. Um it comes from a need from some of our work. What we tried to do, because we're interested in complex words, we tried to pool a bunch of data that we have that used the Woodcock Johnson uh uh words. And we we pooled a bunch of databases and we tried to use all sorts of word predictors to try to predict which words are more difficult than others. And what we found is that for fairly simple one syllable, one morpheme words, we can pretty much predict which words are more difficult than others in a pretty accurate way. But as soon as we got into complex words, we found that we can't predict why one word is more difficult than another. And so um we decided the best way to start learning more about that is to create a database where we have actual kids' data of reading just single words to estimate the difficulty of words, the 10,000 most frequent words in the in the written English language, um, and put them all on a single difficulty scale. So this is what's called an IRT difficulty scale, where it goes from like negative eight to positive eight, negative eight being the easiest word, uh, I think in ours, it's it's either the or cat to uh positive eight, where it's something like uh I can't even think what the what the last word, one of some of the last words are Lord. Can you like maybe maybe something like kernel or or something quite quite strange like that?

Melissa 37:22

And that C O L, right? The C O L O N E L Yeah Not K-E-R-M-E-L.

Don Compton 37:28

Right, exactly. There's multiple pronunciation with different spellings. Um so um so this is now what we did was we um we have we have about 2,000 students grade one through five. Each group each student read um on average about um four to five hundred words for us that were specifically selected um so that they some of the words were uh easier for them. Many of the words were basically at the grade level, and some words were much harder for them. And so no two kids read the same list, and so we have what's called a plan missingness design. And then every kid read a set of linking items, which were from the NIH toolkit and also from the old Woodcock Johnson three. And so you can put this into um a statistical package that will basically use all that information to put all these words on a on a uh continuous difficulty scale going from negative eight to positive eight. And what we did then is wrap it into um a relational database that teachers can use or anybody can use to help them either know more about words they're using in the classroom, which is our query function, or to find words that they want for their instruction or assessment, which is the filter. So we're gonna we're gonna go, unless you have questions that I didn't, or Laura, if you want to say anything, I don't know if I said enough there. Um does it kind of make sense to you?

Melissa 39:05

Totally makes sense. And yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Like let's walk through it.

Don Compton 39:08

Let's let's Yeah, and the data, the the database, the big part of the database for us is we have great equipment ratings and difficulty ratings for all 10,000 words, along with all sorts of compiled data from the field uh about those words. So we're gonna run through an example using the the Delp.

Live DELP Walkthrough For Word Lists

Don Compton 39:28

Um, and what we're gonna do is use the filter um tab in order to select certain types of words that we're interested in. And I'm just gonna say now there's tons of different features in this. We're just gonna go through a few so you can get sort of a taste of what it looks like.

Lori 39:47

So I'm gonna go to the top here and I'm gonna click filter. And why is this an important place? Like, why am I using the filter versus all of the other words?

Don Compton 39:56

Yes. So um, you are using filter because um on the right-hand side, you can see all of the words in the database in alphabetical order. So you have at your fingertips right there all 10,000 words.

Lori 40:09

Oh, that is cool. Like just thinking about that.

Don Compton 40:12

Yeah. So that's it right there. And what we're gonna do is through our filtering, is we're going to select words out of those that have certain characteristics that we want.

Laura Steacy 40:23

Okay.

Don Compton 40:24

Uh either from an instructional or an assessment or just um practice items for kids. So the the first thing we're gonna do is I'm gonna show you how to pick all words in the database that contain the EA vowel pattern.

Lori 40:41

Okay, I'm ready.

Don Compton 40:42

So the first thing we're gonna go to word difficulty, just because we we we want to know how difficult these words are when we select them. So just click on grade equivalent. Very good. Um, the next thing we're gonna do is go to orthography, and we're gonna pick spelling pattern. Click on that. Okay. Number of letters. Great. And then we're gonna go down to phonology, and we're gonna pick pronunciation, and we're gonna pick number of syllables. And so those are now our word variables that we can we can start playing with. And so um what this verse just showed you on the right-hand side is now you have the uh the pronunciations in uh in a certain language, and that's called the SAMPA um pronunciation data. And we're gonna come back to that in a minute because SAMP is a British-based database. And so these are British pronunciations. So when we get somewhere, you're gonna see some things that are gonna be like that. Doesn't make sense to me. Okay, so you've you've selected everything now. Go down a little bit further there, Lori. Okay. See where it says filters?

Lori 41:50

Yes.

Don Compton 41:51

Click on that, and now the magic starts. Okay. Okay. So go up to the top. So um now you have uh you can see your grade range. We have grade range that goes um, that's a grade equivalent range. It goes from zero to 20 because Woodcock has words that go from zero to twenty. Our database does two. Uh, we have a a length, a range and length from one letter to 16 letters. Go down a little bit.

Lori 42:19

Yeah.

Don Compton 42:20

Um, we also have number syllables, which go from one to six. Okay. So the first thing we want to do is we want to search for all words that have EA in them. So see where it says spelling contains?

Lori 42:32

Yep.

Don Compton 42:33

Put EA right there and then hit return. Now that just look at your list. That now contains all words with EA.

Lori 42:42

This is crazy.

Don Compton 42:43

Okay. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna limit those to grade equivalents from one to five. Just to cut it down a little bit. So see where it says grade equivalent, just slide that over to five. Yep. And that just cut us all down to the words that are grade five.

Melissa 42:58

And Don, just a quick question. Grades above 12 would mean like adult.

Don Compton 43:03

Yeah, like uh adult. And so what what you're getting here is um these words may not be adult words per se, but they're decoding the the word recognition difficulty is that of a word that is appropriate for somebody who's in 12th grade.

Lori 43:22

Okay, that's okay.

Don Compton 43:23

Okay. All right. Now we're gonna limit those to words that are no longer than eight letters. I'm gonna let Lori do this. She's already a pro. Look at her. It's very easy.

Lori 43:35

It's very easy. Yeah. And I would say even if you're not sure what you're clicking, just try to keep clicking on some things and play around with it. The filter tool makes it really easy. You just kind of click around and see what happens.

Don Compton 43:45

You can't break it. You can't break it. Okay. Now, now we want. Let's see, what am I gonna do? Okay. Now we've got all these. So EA says a bunch of different things, right? It says F, E, and uh A. Those are the most. Uh so let's let's figure out how to find only the words where EA says eh. Okay. So we're gonna go down to pronunciation and pronunciation contains. Okay? Right there. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a star, meaning it contains, uh capital E. That's that's the sample um um representation for an eh, and then a period. And there you go. All of those words have EAS.

Lori 44:34

Jealous instead, heavenly, leather.

Don Compton 44:38

Yep.

Lori 44:39

Yeah, okay.

Don Compton 44:40

So if you were teaching uh various sound, and and you also have a great equivalent, so you can say, okay, what would be an easy word for a child to know how to read versus a hard one? So if you want to differentiate this, you could. So some kids might get words that are a little easier, some might get words that are hard, but they all see that. Now, let's say, okay, this is just for fun. Let's also then search for those words that have a schwa in them. So you're already in the right spot. You just want to have, you've already got all the words with EA. So um put star again.

Lori 45:16

Oh, I have to do a star first. Okay, star.

Don Compton 45:18

Yeah.

Lori 45:18

Then the upward triangle thing above the no, you don't need that one. No. Okay.

Don Compton 45:25

Yeah, I did. You're you're you're making it harder for yourself because that that usually tells you to start with. So we're we're just the star means it just continues.

Lori 45:34

So you're saying anywhere. Okay.

Don Compton 45:36

Yeah. And then put in the uh the about sign.

Lori 45:39

The about sign.

Don Compton 45:40

Or the at sign. Yeah. And then uh, and then another uh period. Now and get rid of the space in between.

Lori 45:48

Oh, oh, sorry. Okay.

Don Compton 45:51

There we go. And we should have there we go. There are EA words with eh that are grade one through five, less than eight letters, and um have a schwa. Now here's where we need to talk about the schwa. Like in the word dreaded, the way I say it, E D does not have a schwa in it. But in the British language, it does, because the way they say ER and E D, they reduce the vowel. And so it's a schwa for them. So um, so that's where you have to sort of uh start looking at, okay, is this a pronunciation that would be English or or um something else? Okay. Okay, so the thing we need to do is just as soon as we see a word, immediately say it with a British accent and and then um, but the it's just a caution so that when you're selecting these words and you're teaching the swath in in US English, you're not picking a bunch of examples that actually you would have to use a British uh accent in order for it to make sense for it to be a schwa. And then if you want to go on down to the bottom of that floor, then we could also then say, let's just do it for two syllables. So all the way down at the bottom, let's just cut it down to words for two syllables. Yeah. And there you go. That that's your your list of words that you get when they when you do that.

Lori 47:15

That is the and just a little note for you know those of you who are listening, you can download this list. So you can download the list then after you have the list, you can use the list, save the list.

Don Compton 47:25

Yep. Yep. It's then and you can um if you click on more um variables to filter by, but not use them, that data will be part of what you save. So, like if you wanted to see, you know, um, you know, I don't know, like how many orthographic neighbors it has. If you click on that, you don't have to filter on that, but it'll give you that information when you save it.

Lori 47:51

Okay. And also, I look see that there's like a morphology here too.

Don Compton 47:54

There, there is. And and um for people interested in morphology, see that morph spell?

Lori 48:00

Yeah, I didn't know what what that was.

Don Compton 48:02

That's that's to search for words that um with a spelling morphology, because um, like if you just put in that I want to find it, you get city. Now, the ITY and city is not morpheme. But if you put in morphological spelling and put ITY in, it will then just pick it where it is a morphological spelling. So city would not be in there.

Lori 48:26

That is so helpful. That is so helpful. That actually, I feel like is the bane of your morphology. That's like the bane of every teacher's morphology instruction. Like that is it. Is it a morpheme in this word?

Melissa 48:38

I don't know.

Don Compton 48:38

Right, right. Now, just know that um these databases, uh, they we're we're reliant on the general ELP database. And so number of morphemes is somewhat controversial. So, but it will at least, if you put in ITY as a morphological spelling, it will pick words where it's pretty pretty, you're pretty sure that that ITY is a morpheme. So it's flick. That is very important. And this this program is called a Shiny app. Um, and so we have almost we have over a thousand users now, um, and it's growing every day. And so um if you would like to use this as a teacher, it's free to use for you. Um, it's for non-commercial purposes. And you can just go to the FCRR website, find the Delp project, and there is a link to sign up. All you do is sign up, um, and then in a day or two, you'll get an email from me with the link, and you just can use it to your heart is content.

One Small Shift To Try Tomorrow

Don Compton 49:43

And your students are excellent readers and spellers.

Lori 49:46

Okay, so this is a really great tool for teaching complex words for uh teachers to use as they help students access those words. I'm wondering if we can really kind of bring this to a close here with thinking about one small shift a teacher can try tomorrow to better support students as they encounter these words.

Laura Steacy 50:08

I would say one uh thing that we would recommend is to rely on what the student already knows from a decoding standpoint across grain sizes and encourage them to make the best attempt at a complex word, using word level information first, and then deciding the pronunciation, whether the pronunciation makes sense or not based on the sentence.

Don Compton 50:35

Right. And use the delp, thinking about what you've taught so far in your classroom to select words that have pieces that kids, if they use them in a way that you've taught them, they'll come close to the right word. And that way you are sort of um getting the child knowledge from an instructional standpoint to match sort of the word demands in a way that kids can be successful. And you know, building confidence in kids to sort of attack these words, that's what we want. We want them to be self um self-decoding, self-readers, um, self-teachers. So that match, the Delp will help you with that match because you can think about how I can align words that fit with what I've taught so far in a way that will be challenging and meaningful to kids.

Melissa 51:29

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Lori 51:39

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Melissa 51:49

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Lori 52:01

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