E34 | Reading Long Words with Dr. Devin Kearns

Polysyllabic words, polymorphemic words, and what it means for instruction. It's coming up on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. of the Teaching Literacy Podcast. I'm your host, Jake Downs. I am a literacy coordinator for a local school district, an adjunct instructor at Utah State University, and I have a PhD in literacy and leadership from that institution. This podcast is all about bridging literacy research into practice. Welcome to this episode. I am very glad to have you with us.

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So with that, let's get to today's episode. My guest on the show today is Dr. Devin Kearns. He's an associate professor of special education in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. And his research focuses on reading disability, including dyslexia, in school-aged children, and he has an emphasis on linking educational practice to cognitive science, which makes him a great fit for the show.

doctor Kern's authored a chapter in doctor Louise Spearswerling's recent book, Structured Literacy Interventions. I interviewed doctor Spearswerling in the last episode about her book, so I really recommend you check that episode out. Uh doctor Kearns' chapter in that book focused specifically on reading long words, and the discussion in the episode today I pulled from a couple other articles that I've read and appreciated by him as well. We have a great discussion around

Polysyllabic words, polymorphemic words, and we also have a little chit-chat about Wordle as as well. Dr. Kearns has some great instructional tools and resources just available for free for teachers. I'll be linking to them in the show notes, but you want to make sure to listen to the episode to get an idea of what those are and how they might benefit you in the classroom. Once you're done listening to the episode, stick around and listen to Jake's take on what we talked about.

And without further ado, I bring you Dr. Devin Kearns. Dr. Devin Kearns, welcome to the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. We're glad to have you on the show. To get us started, will you give us a short history of your background, uh research interests, and how those developed into your research interests?

Yeah, sure. So uh I was an elementary school teacher in the Los Angeles area public schools for uh seven years, uh including a couple of those years as a literacy coach where I worked with teachers, grades, K6, and helped them implement reading instruction. Um, it's part of that uh when I started teaching, I didn't really know how to teach reading very well. And I regret to say that.

Uh the first couple of classes, students that I had didn't really learn to read very well in my class. I taught third grade and I had uh students who came to my class and didn't know how to read and sadly they left my class. Uh and so once I learned about how to teach reading, I worked at a clinic part time for kids with uh learning disabilities, including dyslexia. And that's why we're teach reading.

And after I learned about it, I was kind of mad that no one had ever told me about the things that I learned, right? Like why didn't I not why did I not know about how

you know, long vowel sound work and things like that. That had never been explained to me uh when I started teaching reading before in my pre service instruction. And so Once I learned about it, I was really upset that no one had told me and I decided I was gonna go to graduate school to get a degree so I could learn how to teach teachers better so they wouldn't end up like I

Uh it turns out though the graduate school is not about that. So if you ever want to get a PhD, the good thing they don't really teach you how to teach teachers, they teach you how to do research. So it turned out that that actually was a pretty good fit for me. And Uh in graduate school though, I started to get interested in how we can study things like

How do you read long words? And really long words are complicated. I know we're gonna talk about that. And so I started getting interested in how do we make good decisions about what to teach kids about how we're

I love that background story. One thing that I really appreciate about your work, Dr. Kearns, is that you um work really hard to to communicate to practitioners and in in in ways that are familiar to them and and applicable to them. One of those things that you've done as outreach to teachers is you have a tool called Finder. P-H-I-N-D-E-R. And when I saw this, I was like, holy smokes, this is awesome. So before we get into our discussion about reading long words.

Will you just tell us a bit about Finder and how it might be useful for teachers and where they can find it? Yeah, where do you find finder? Uh yeah, so uh I so finder, which is located at devon currents.com slash finder, b-h I-n-e-r. Uh the DACA I it is for it is free, so you do not need to pay a single day to use it. I created it because when I was uh teaching reading at the clinic,

I had to come up with lists of words all the time and it was hard. Sometimes I was like, I can't think of another AI word. Like, you know, like what's a Valconsum E word I can come up with? And so Uh I worked with a computer programmer and we designed the

way of linking letters and sounds where it was possible to extract like one letter sound. So I could just so what you can do with binder is you can type in there AI and it'll bring up uh A and I and you click on it and basically you can click on these or give you a list of every word that it has in it that has like an AI that says A for

And so it's pretty helpful if you're trying to think of like words with some pattern that it will help you it will help you do that. It's not as helpful for word all as you might like, but it is helpful for a lot of um instructional purposes. So yes, that's what Finder came from. And I definitely recommend taking a look at it. Like it will always be there as a free resource for people. So definitely.

Well what I love about it is it also you can uh filter by number of syllables that you want. So maybe you're not just looking for a one syllable word, maybe you're looking for a two or three syllable word.

And then you can, you know, rank sort from least amount of syllables to highest or from third on down and you can play with word frequency and That I mean th it it really is a very applicable tool for developing Wordless and that what that was my next question was how how it helps out with Wordle because

If teachers aren't making wordless, I do know that for a fact they're all playing wordles. Sounds like they might have to go to the Scrabble dictionary or Yeah, this is not the tool for that. It doesn't tell you about I mean I could give you a list of uh you may attach and spy outs away.

high frequency like letters, like, you know, N is the most frequent letter in the language, for example. So that we can do separately, but no finder won't help you. So yeah, go check out Finder at uh Devin Kearns.com. I like I said, I I loved it and and I I I think it's a very, very useful tool. Uh so getting into more of our our outline, our discussion point. Um

What we're going to be talking about today is teaching students to read long words. And uh one of the places where I I've read a read your work recently was in the uh structured literacy interventions text by uh edited by Louisa Motz, and you wrote a chapter in there. Um and and what I like about how you and I I thought this was interesting at first.

But you uh of terming it of reading long words. And I thought, well, why doesn't why doesn't he just say polysyllabic words? That sounds more academic, that sounds more researchy. And I I hope listeners, as we go throughout this outline, you'll be able to start to realize. Maybe why reading long words was terminology that was selected rather than just um poly polysyllabic words or or some other term. So

You know, we know that reading long words can be tricky for many readers, and uh they're especially tricky for students who have reading difficulties. Um can we talk for a second about why reading long words might be extra challenging for students with with dyslexia? Yeah, for sure. One thing that's interesting about long words is especially polymer. Is that every one of them has a schwa in it, right? So the schwa sound, which uh most literacy people would know, but some may not so I share.

is it's a reduced vowel, which means it's a shortened vowel in a word. So we don't say all the syllables with the same emphasis, right? We make some of them shorter and it's because English is a stress-time language where we try to keep the amount of time between each stress syllable the same. And so what that means is we shorten some of the syllables to make them faster to say.

Uh which good works great, except that sometimes it means you have to say things in the way that they aren't spelled. So for example, you know, the reduced vowel sound is closest to like a short U sound, an U sound. It's not exactly the same thing. It's closest to that.

But sometimes you'll have a letter A or a letter O that's spelled with the schwa sound and the problem is that it Hard to figure out, like if you sound it out with the regular vowel sound, like in about and say the A with an A sound, A with an A sound. A about, about, about, like the A doesn't sound the same. And so for children who have difficulty with reading, if they sound it out as about

it might be hard for them to actually make that switch to make it about. And so for children have difficulty with phonological processing. Sound processing. doing these kinds of manipulations can be particularly difficult. And some col I've done research and some of my colleagues have done research on the fact that one thing that actually is really hard for kids is

uh who have difficulty is basically taking something that sounds almost right and turning out into the right thing. I don't know if any of your listeners have ever had s uh students who, you know, they could sound out But they couldn't say fan. And that's not uncommon because the sounds in fan don't sound exactly the same as the word fan.

And that kind of thing is especially prominent in Islamic works. And so it can be very hard for kids to read them. There are also more pieces to put together, that kind of thing. So there's other stuff too. But one of the biggest issues is that on the letters. Often don't say exactly what you're doing. And that's something fascinating that I find in the phonological world that us proficient readers might have a blind spot there where we're not realizing those subtle shifts in in vowel sounds or

Bah we're turning the sound for letter B into really three sounds. And those are subtle things that might not matter to us, but for they matter for developing readers. And they especially matter for students that uh are have challenges.

with reading. So so being accurate and precise really, really does matter. Uh so so I'm I'm assuming that our our listeners are are familiar with syllables. I really like how you describe syllables in your right in your in your writing as

Every part has a vowel and every part has to look okay. So can you give us a pre- a brief recap on uh syllabication and how you um How how uh can you can you give us a brief recap on on syllabication and then also how um some additional background on syllables and and and teaching syllables? Yeah, sure. So yeah, so basically, I mean that's the definition of a syllable is that it has a it's a vowel syllabus.

It's a vowel-centered unit in a word, right? So uh and usually that comes with a vowel letter. There are a few cases where there isn't a vowel letter. But most of the time there's a vowel letter that sort of anchors the syllable. So when uh when you write, every part has a vowel, that both means Sounds like a vowel and it means that it has bowel like

So one recommendation often is to do something called Ishala, E-S-H-A-L-O-B, meaning every syllable has at least one vowel. I did not come up with that. Rolanda O'Connor, who's a researcher. Um who's done a lot of really great work came up with that. Um and

So Roland O'Connor's every syllable have at least one vowel. That's true. And so sometimes people actually when kids are trying to learn how to break words into parts, they'll have kids like underline the bells, for example, to help them understand that like these different parts have to be separated because this is a bell and that's a bow.

Of course with the Valcons E patterns that gets really complicated. Fortunately they're most of the time at the end, which makes it a little bit easier, although not always makes Trickier. Um so that is the first piece of it in terms of having a vowel. The second piece of it in terms of like looking okay is that syllables can't begin or end with letter combinations English that don't. So this is kind of like the wordle of bags, I guess is like you have to have uh combinations of letters that are

uh reasonable to have in the language, right? So So for example, the word that I did today for Wordle was cargo, I think. And oh sorry. I haven't played it yet. Yeah, a lot of people did. I I almost lost too. What was already started for? Uh uh foyer, but my last word was joker that I guessed, and I'm I'm I'm still pretty upset, so I might take a day off a wordle so.

Okay, yeah. Yeah. So well anyway, so all right. So I apologize for that. But um in that one, you know, if if you're gonna break cardio into syllables, you can't do C A and then R G O. Um not simply because it's Right. So if you do the RGO.

That unit is not a pattern in English. You never have a syllable start with R G in English. So when you break words into syllables, the parts have to look okay and that the letters have to appear the way they do in a real word, like at the beginning or the end of a real

I really like that addition of the the looking okay. You know, our listeners are probably somewhat familiar with, you know, the six different syllable patterns of open and closed and and those can sometimes be tricky to kind of keep track of, but For me, it seems very pragmatic to say, well, is that a letter combination that we have in English? And having that be a strategy to also assist with those others to to divide up a word into syllables. Um

This is an area that I've been very interested in the last little bit. It's been a blind spot in my research knowledge, and I've been really trying to study hard to learn more about it. But our listeners are probably less familiar with morphemes than they are with syllables.

So can you talk a bit about morphemes and how we typically categorize morphemes? Sure. All right. Well, I'll get into the weeds for a minute and then you can edit this phone however you want. The weeds is where I want to go. So that's that's let's do it. Yeah. All right. The morpheme is a unit of meaning in a word.

So uh let's start with the word like basketball. So basketball has three syllables, bass, cat, ball, um, but it has two more themes, right? It has the basket, which is one meaning, and ball. So those are morphemes or units of meaning. And the word basketball, both of them happen to be free morphemed, which means they can also be word. So you sum you have both three mar beams and bound. Bound morphemes can't be words on their own.

for example like viz and visible that's a bound morpheme you can't separate it from letters like I B L E you have to have something connected to it. Those are in that case, this is also a root. So roots are parts of words that have meanings that form kind of a core of the word, but are not usually or not I shouldn't say not usually are sometimes not

complete words on their own. They're bound morphemes. The other kind of bound morphemes you have are inflections. So inflections are Part of uh their endings that don't affect the meaning of the word in any way, but they affect like the tense, like E, D, I, N, G, or the number, or plural, singular. So those are inflections.

And then uh derivations or derivational affixes are added and those do change the meaning in some way. It'll change a noun into a verb, like you well, you can make a noun into an adjective, like act to active. And it can change the meaning by adding it uh uh prefix like un, which means not. And so all those are different aspects of morphology is that they these are kind of the meaning parts of the words. And there's

All kind of extra fun complexities to it, but those are the main ones. Also there are compound words. Words that are composed of two free morphemes. They're the simplest ones in English. They're kind of like the original Anglo-Saxon morphemes are. those ones we kind of compounded things early on, like German does that anyway, since the language is ultimately Germanic, that makes a lot of sense. And then the Latin which came to Britain

Yeah, I don't know, whatever. Whatever was conquered by the Romans, I don't know. I think ten sixty six, I think I think it's I or no, that was the French one. That was Right. Yeah, right. That's what that's when the Normans came, the French, right? So yeah, I think it's ca that's connected too, right? Because I think after the Norman conquest that was when At court they only spoke French and like the, you know

The plebes outside of the castle spoke, you know, English and I think kind of eventually blended together. The result is that we have a lot of Latin-based words. That aren't compounds but have derivations. I'll just put a plug-in uh for Freddie Hebert's book, Teaching Words and How They Work. She has a great chapter on the the history of English and and why it matters. So there's a a plug if if

that sort of thing is your jam. But I I what I like about morphemes is I I feel there's this national conversation right now around orthographic mapping and and Linnea Ares work.

And and shout out to Dr. Dana Robertson for tipping me off to this of when we think about orthographic mapping, that we we're typically thinking about that as connecting uh graphemes with phonemes, right? Of cementing that. But if you You know, really look at her work, and especially she has a 2014 publication where this is very clear where it's really mapping the phoneme and the grapheme.

With the morpheme. So it's it's also being able to have the meaning of that word bound also to its its sounds and its its letter appearance. And that's where I think morpheme, morpheme instruction, morphemic analysis can be really powerful is because it is helping bind bind meaning to the word rather than just being able to strictly decode the word. So you distinguish between polysyllabic words, which I'm I can almost guarantee the listeners are familiar with.

But this is a word you've introduced me that I like is polymorphemic words. So can you define polysyllabic versus polymorphemic where there's overlap and then where there's differences and why those differences matter? Yeah, sure. Well, to start, I'll just talk about polysyllabic. So so for a long time I always had multisyllabic. And then when I had to write about this like academically for the first time, I really struggled because in the literature

Well, yeah, but Archer. Some people say polysyllabic, some people say mono morph m uh uh multisyllabic. I wasn't sure which to pick and basically I landed on polyslap, even though that's not to traditionally what people had said in education, because it matched up with polymorphic. So poly meaning many, right?

And syllabic meaning syllables. So polysyllabic more than one syllable. Polymorphemic, more than one morpheme. So a polymorphemic word is, you know, basketball is a polymorphemic word. It has two more. Basketballs is a polymorphemic word. It has three morphemes. So polymorphemic words have more than one more. So an example of this, and I I I love this, and this is in your I think is it 2018 publication with Victoria Whaley. So you present two words and they they both have twelve syllables.

And I'll just read off the words and then we can talk about them. So the first word that has 12 syllables, it has six different morphemes. And so the word is pseudo-seudhypothyroid. So hearing that word, they're probably to pick out several different morphemes that they're familiar with, like such as

you know, pseudo and hypo and and thyroid is a word that they're probably familiar with, and then ism. And then I I I apologize for for listeners who are proficient in Hawaiian language, but the other word that has 12 syllables, it's only one morphine. And the word is humu humu nu ku nuku uhua. And and it's the state fish of Hawaii is what it is. And it's also known as a reef trigger fish.

Work um yeah. So will you talk about those two words and why? One word they both had 12 syllables, but you know, why one of those seems so much, you know, stickier uh, you know, to to the majority of us listening than the other. Well that's the neat thing about morphides is they kind of create bigger packages for

So one advantage to learning morphemes, to teaching kids morphemes, especially kids with reading difficulty, is it creates bigger units for So it's a little bit easier sometimes to put words together if you could put them together in like bigger packages. So humo humo nukunuku, you know, every one of those. Humo humo.

Those don't mean anything to us. So we have to look at them one at a time. And when you have lots of unfamiliar units like that, it becomes very hard to read them. Whereas with sudo sudo, We've we've seen sudo before, right? And so we know that we we with that part of that chunk of the word is kind of worked out for us. So when we look at that whole unit, we can say it together as opposed to having to look at all the individual mini

So that's where like Shun T I O N is really helpful. That's four letters. And you can, if you see T I O N, you know. That's Shun. And basically that part of the word is solved for you, like Shus, T-I-O-U-S, like even more so, right? Shunt T-I-E-N-D. So all these things are kind of packages of letters that

you can kind of peel off so that there's not as much work to do figuring out everything that the word says. And that's what I think is really the advantage is they they make reading long words, make

You end up with fewer parts when you try to re read the lot more. And that I think is a really powerful aspect of thinking about trade offs between polysyllabic instruction and polymorphemic construction is, you know, we know that the the progression of reading uh you know very much deals with being able to process very efficiently larger chunks.

of language at a time. So progressing from, you know, single letters to groups of letters to whole words. And um, you know, for some of our readers, it it might be more beneficial if if if pseudo is a single chunk. rather than having to divide that into two syllables, it it it makes more sense to help us, you know, process pseudo as that single chunk than it is to you know, perhaps uh divide it by syllable when when once you break it down by syllable you're also losing

Losing the meaning. Um, is there any is can can you comment a little bit more on you know trade-offs between uh polysyllabic and polymorphemic? in instruction and and when one might be preferred over the other or how thinking thinking about strategically on both of those you need you need strategies for both things. Um, English has a lot of polymorphemic words, uh, which I could think of as statistic, but over two syllables, most words, most three syllable plus words have at least two more.

So it's really convenient to learn about morpheme because you're going to encounter a lot of them. But they're not going to help you all the time. There are plenty of words that only have one morpheme, but have more than one syllable. And the result is that you need to figure out how to read those words if you can't figure out the

you know, the individual pieces on their own. So, you know, um a word like like cargo, you need to figure out how to break that into two pieces and neither of them, go happens to be a word, not related to the meaning, but you have to figure out a way

too I guess car car does too. Uh car is a word too. Um but you have to figure out how to break those into pieces. It's a really bad example. But onion or something like that. I mean, you know, there's no meaningful parts in there. You have to figure out a way to break it up. Onion's a really hard one. I'm coming up with really bad word choices this morning. Uh what's another

I usually be pretty good at the like locomotion, that's what I think of, right? So locomotion it has the shun in it but but the rest of it you still have to figure out, right? You have the logo mo and how do you why not la comma or whatever. You need to have a strategy for breaking it into pieces so you can read it. So you're not going to get far enough just with the morpheme. But the morphemes are really helpful to teach kids

Even if you're not spending a lot of time on meaning, just as sound units, they can be really useful. T connecting them with meaning uh is helpful too. One of the Some of the data suggests that one of the real advantages of applying morphemic instruction is it it tunes kids into the meaning parts and words in a way that actually supports vocabulary and reading.

development. So for older students, including kids with disabilities, over and kids who are multilingual learners, over like sixth grade. One of the really great benefits of morphological instruction is it improves kids' vocabulary. Uh and there have been some really great studies showing the power of that and tuning kids into how uh, you know, these parts have meanings is incredibly useful.

So that's great. But then there are going to be cases where you need to figure out how to break over into pieces. And that's where people talk about things like Soul division as a way of which, you know, is complicated and sort of like almost controversial as you know, but uh but it is important to have a strategy that's not just about the marketings. You're going to need smaller

Fantastic. So if I summarize that, if we're talking You know, words that are three syllables or more, perhaps thinking of a morphemic approach. breaking into meaningful word parts might be a first step, but also being aware that there's going to be words that where we do have to have more of a strictly syllable decoding emphasis because it

uh, you know, perhaps those morphemes aren't very, you know, clear to students or perhaps that uh there just isn't a neat, tidy way to break it into morphemes. And so then a a syllabic approach might be more beneficial. Is that an

accurate summary. Yep. No, that's exactly right. You keep I I'll stop saying things because you summarize it nice. So c can you talk to us about what might Q in a teacher

to know when an individual or when a a group of students needs support with reading long words. Well, it'll begin by showing up with difficulty reading short words. If they're difficult reading short words, the long words will be hard for them to What you'll find is that there are going to be students though who can who have learned good strategies for reading short words.

But that starts to fall apart when they read long words because they don't have good strategies for doing it. So I'm sure all of your listeners have worked with students who They learned, you know, they had difficulty reading. They taught them some foundational ideas about how letters and sounds are connected. That all seemed to work well. But then when they were asked to apply that to long works, it didn't work because there are parts in these works that

Aren't familiar and they don't have a strategy for breaking them apart. That's what you're going to see in students kind of like frozen by these. letter sound units that are not familiar to them. They'll probably try to break them up by letter sound the same way. I say letter sound, by the way. I I know that letter sound are not letter sound. It's just convenient.

Um, once upon a time I got really mad at people. It's like letter sound. And I mean, no, that's not a thing. It's not just letters. It's, you know. Graphene, which is true, but it's really convenient to say letter sound. So I know they're grappy phone for it. Let's I'm just gonna say letter sound. I do want your listeners to know I know that that is not exactly always the right term. In any case, so kids will use letter sounds because that's what they know.

But it doesn't work very well. It takes a long time. It's really laborious. And if you don't have a strategy for breaking into pieces of any kind, you're gonna struggle. So that's what you'll see is kids trying to do it sound by sound. And that is or letter by. Letter or letter combination by letter combination and by graphing by graphing aside.

Part of that deals with with short-term memory, right? I mean, if you're if you're trying to do sound by sound by sound by sound, by the time you get to the end of the word, You know, you you don't have enough bandwidth of processing to be able to remember where you were at at the at the beginning. at the beginning of the word. Yeah. And for your buttons who know about, you know, phonological processing.

that did indicate like, you know, verbal short term memory is a critical part of being able to do phonological processing. And you're right, you're really straining it the the more things you have to keep in mind. Yep, exactly. That's uh

double deficit, I think is what that's called in the literature, right? Where student struggles with not only the phonological aspects of reading, uh, but also uh struggles with with short-term processing. And so those those specific types of students have a very challenging time with. with reading in general, but especially especially long words.

Yep. So you you outlined earlier in the episode the the Eshlov um approach for polysyllabic words. Can you outline one specific kind of step by step of of of instruction for what it would be like to teach a polymorphemic word. Yeah, sure. One that I so there are a number of them, but most of them involve like affix peeling is kind of the idea. So really it's looking for affixes on the borders of the word, on the outside edges of the word.

And uh I like the term, you know, peeling off is a term that was used by Maureen Lovett and Colleen. their program called FAST. They now market it by a different name. So I'm not going to talk about programs. I'll just say the research version was FAST, PHAST, photological and strategy training. And the strategy was that you got a long word And more than one syllable you'd look for more themes.

They taught a bunch of morphines so students could remember them. They had a peeling off tree. So basically like they'd have, you know. list of morphemes that you would teach the kids to read quickly and so on. And then you look for those in the words and they'd peel them up. So they would take off the more the Uh the you can't see me you know, with my hands pulling things out of the air here, but um

Basically you kind of almost literally peeled out. You cover them with an index card or something one by one until you got down to a core that couldn't be divided anymore. And then you try to figure out how to read that core component. And It was like pseudo-seudohoparathyroidism, you get down to thyroid and you have to sound out thyroid because that part

can't be broken down anymore. Once you got that part, you can put it back together and read the affixes and then say the whole word. So that's the that's the strategy. And it It's in a lot of different programs. Anita Archer developed a program that has the they have the this covert and this overt strategy. Really the strategies involved. I mean, in her version

you circle the apexes and then when you get down to kind of the core of it, you underline the bowels, like we talked about before, you know, that every cell leaves one bowel. You break into parts and then you put it back together. And I love it because uh like many things that archer does they're very well thought out. And I love it because it's a really quick and easy way to do the work like when you're reading. So the way that

She recommends teaching it. Really aligns with the idea that you need something that quick and easy and you can do on the fly, which is to say while you're reading aloud. And so that sort of like find the affixes, break the part according to the syllables based on, you know, they have at least one vowel.

put it back together and read it, uh it's really efficient and effective and so um if Again, I'm not gonna name programs, but I'll tell you this that if I were to have written a bonic program, I wish I'd written the one sheet because I think the

Excellent. Yeah. I need an archer. Always attention to precision there. And I appreciate the thinking about, you know, covert strategy and overt strategy of in the end of teaching a a a reader if they can apply that strategy when they are encountering difficult and challenging tech

You know, that that also matters. You know, we we can give them help them with the automaticity with the words that we're working on. But if they can transfer a strategy outside of that instruction, then that's obviously a major win. Totally. And and I realized when you did the correct pronunciation that I I misread the the pseudo-seudo-hypoparathyroidism earlier. I I didn't include the

the para. So uh, you know, I I I guess I could benefit from some of these strategies as as well, because that's a long word that was difficult for me to read. Right. It also turns out that I've said that word a lot of times because I wrote about it. So Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this is a question that I've kind of fielded a few times this year and I haven't quite known how to how to answer it. So

My question is, are there guidelines for how many syllables or how many morphemes that students should be able to read in a single word at different like third grade versus fourth versus fifth versus middle grades versus high school? how to kind of hone in or be strategic with the amount of syllables we're teaching them to decode. Yeah. Thanks for asking me the question. I can't answer either. Um so I don't know exactly. I think, you know

So I with my doctoral students, we've done some work, uh done a lot of analyses of words, right? As you you'd know. But anyone who's kind of read anything I've done is do a lot of analysis of words in the language and try and understand their features. What's always hard is that there's this trade off between the number of units that you have to teach somebody. And their utility in terms of

understand the language. So there are going to be morphemes that only apply to a few words. And so if there are morphemes that only apply to like say 40 words, the question is whether or not it's useful to teach that. I don't have a really clear answer on that. You can ask the same question about letter sounds, you know, or graphic phoning correspondence.

How many you're supposed to teach? I have no idea. What I can tell you having done this analysis is if you teach three hundred and fifty of them, you can pretty much read every word a kid in fifth Right. But who's gonna teach kids three hundred and fifty letter sounds? No one, because a lot of them are really unusual and

unhelpful to teach somebody, right? So um for example, ACH says, oh, like in yacht, not really helpful for kids to learn, right? So There and then but somewhere down around like a hundred, sort of the sweet spot seems to be in terms of the trade-off between frequency and the utility. It's somewhere around like a hundred between like ninety and a hundred letter sounds will get you a lot of words in the language.

After that, the fewer you teach, the fewer words you get in the language, but the fewer things students have to remember. And that's the trade-off, right? So I don't have a good answer about how many you should teach because there just isn't an answer. It's really just a question of like how much of the language do you think kids have to be able to know of?

do they have to be able to know by you right if you really think it's essential for them to have a letter sound strategy for most words then you need to teach more letter sounds if you don't think it's very important then you teach fewer of them. And this is kind of like I don't want to go too far down the road with you because it's not the prior point of the podcast, but it's about whole language versus kind of phonics or balanced Twitter seat versus phonics.

A big disagreement, you know, ballots literacy people who sort of like have they say they believe in bonics, and I believe. But the difference between the way they think about it and kind of a science of reading person thinks about it is how extensive that should be. Balance literacy people want to do like alphabet letters and a few other things like Balcons knee pattern. And that's it. And science of reading people want more. How much more is the question?

So I have not answered your question because I don't think there is a good answer. Um it's just a matter of how detailed you want students to be in terms of their understanding of units within words. Do they need a lot of them or is it better to give them fewer of them but ones are really high power being quite a lot of words and then kind of allowing them to extrapolate from

There isn't a good answer on that. But um, you know, I think that in general, the limited way that a lot of ballots literacy people want to do it is too limited. I think you can go too far in the other. Like I've read that, you know, G U says glook like in penguin. Okay.

We are way down the like the path of too much there. So so I don't have a good answer, unfortunately. But um I'm I actually have on my website on DerekPurch dot org. Don't ask me why I'd have two of them. It's just like it was some It's not gonna try to sell anything on the dot com, it's just that like anyway. It's complicated. But what I will say is on democrats.org I actually have a list somewhere on there of

um really frequent uh letter sounds or graphing phoning correspondences. So for your listeners, like if you go there, I think you it's pretty easy to find on there somewhere. It's like resources for teachers. So

you know, you can make your own decision, right, about like which ones are useful to teach and based on what you think your students need. And you know, I think one of the reasons that for kids with dyslexia and learning disabilities, the reason people want to teach those kids a lot of them is that it feels like it gives the kids an anchor. Right. So one of the challenges kids with learning disabilities have

is that it's hard for them to kind of put things together and sort of do that thing I was talking about earlier. Like you can't figure out exactly, it doesn't sound exactly the right way. People want to give kids more information so they don't have as much work to do trying to like

kind of put things together kind of by inference. And so they want to give kids all of the information to help them put it together, which means you teach a lot more of that. Whether or not that's a good idea isn't entirely clear. But well, it's helpful to teach a lot of letter sound. Where you stop. Nobody knows because it really kind of depends on a lot of factors. One of which is how good is the kid at remembering letters? Right. So

Anyway, I I'm really good at not answering your questions, James. So I don't think I answered that one either. I don't have a good answer because I don't think they're really it's one. Well, I I think you hit on a really couple of important things and I and I'll I'll find that resource and I'll link to that in the show notes. That's o okay with you for the so folks can just find it easy.

Uh but a a small critique of mine that I have of the science of reading movement is sometimes it's presented in practitioner circles as this is.

settled science. This is done science. This is we we we know and and we do know a lot. But I I think this discussion that we're having shows where there is room for further research and further evolution and and Yeah, and thinking strategically of that trade-off between, you know, what is what has the most you know utility across the most amount of words versus the instructional time that we can actually spend reading all those other words. And I think that's a...

trade off that's very prevalent in vocabulary instruction, you know, single word vocabulary instruction is as well. What w what words do kids need to know? Well, I it depends on the text you're reading and depends on how you how much utility that word has across context. You know, there's a lot of words in English. No, it's right. I mean it's like, you know, I worked on a uh reading program for middle schoolers. Uh we were trying to help teachers decide what words to teach.

And it's sort of like, you know, people talk about kind of tiered words, right? Like tier one words are really common, tier two words are kind of high utility academic words, tier three words are really content specific. And it gives you the impression like you should focus on tier two words, but I think as you alluded to, you need tier three words a lot too. Like you need to teach kids tier three words for certain texts, right? So like

I the example I always give is like the you know the I don't know if you remember the short story, The Lottery from high school. Oh I'm not familiar. I had to read it. Uh oh it's interesting. So a word in the story is paraphernalia. Which is important because for this lottery this town has, they need paraphernalia, right? You sort of have to understand what that word means. It's a really uncommon word, but for reading the lottery is actually pretty helpful to understand. And um

It's worth a read. It's a really it's one of those like it's a well, I'm not gonna say it's a fun story. The ending is kind of upsetting, but the idea that you need paraphernalia is a really good one. So um so you need some of those tier three words, right? But we need to be just strategic about

How many of those do we teach versus those high utility tier two words? So yeah, lots of trade-offs and you really need to make a decision based on like hunt. I mean you're I'm gonna stop again because you said all the things that I should have said. So

Well uh Dr. Kearns, thank you for joining us on the show. This has been a wealth of knowledge for me and a very engaging discussion. Uh we've we've kind of already mentioned some of these of DevonKearns.com, DevinKurns.org.

Maybe there's a dot net or a dot XYZ. We we haven't mentioned. I know those are the only those are the only ones I've got. So if you go to the other I don't know what the other ones have since don't invent, but uh definitely go to those two. The dot com one has the slash binder. It's'cause basically it's a web hosting thing and uh the dot org is where everything.

That's where the most of the resources are. There's stuff about vocabulary and stuff on there too. I just suggest people see what you can find. There's a number of things. There's like a list of like the Dolce and Fry words'cause I can never find them. So if you want those, they're up in there too.

Just take a look. You'll probably find it. Wonderful. And and for uh you know listeners interested in in reading a bit more about what we talked about, I I heartily endorse uh Dr. Kearns' chapter in Louise Spearswerling's book, Structured Literacy Intervention. And that'd be a great way to get a little bit additional information on the what we've been talking about today. Um so Dr. Kearns, the final question that I ask all my guests, what do you what do you think makes a good teacher?

I think uh knowledge paired with skill paired pairing for kids. Um I it's not enough to know things about birds. Um and it's the ability to apply that knowledge in ways that make it understandable for children. If you understand how so will work, that's great. But if you can't communicate that to kids in ways that allow them to read quickly and efficiently.

enough. So I think those are kind of the things in terms of reading, those are the things you need. Of course, you need a lot of sort of these soft social emotional skills now more than ever. But in terms of like the reading stuff, I think the Yo pair of knowledge right a key. Dr. Devin Kearns, thanks for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast.

A big thanks to Dr. Kearns for joining us on the Teaching Literacy Podcast. Here's my quick take on what we talked about. As listeners of the show, you're probably familiar with Scarborough's rope, the reading rope, right, where you have a

decoding strand and you have a language strand, and that's of course taken from Turner and Go's simple view of reading. And what I really liked about what doctor Kearns had to say about polymorphemic construction and and thinking around that is typically we think of those as two different strands.

Right? That there's things on the decoding side and there's things on the language side. What I really like that he brings the table is it's not that vocabulary is on the language strand and the decoding is just on the decoding strand. But that when we're talking polymorphemic construction, we can actually be doing both strands at the same time.

Those multiple strands of the rope matter, but in the end, if we're going to be effective teachers of literacy, all those different strands of the reading rope have to become a rope. And the rope is having a literate reader. And so I love in thinking about polymorphemic construction is that by helping students Peel apart the morphemes.

and be able to recognize the word. It's going to help them decode the word, which I'm thinking of terms of cognitive efficiency that if a student can input a bigger chunk of a morpheme rather than going by all the individual syllables perhaps, maybe like a three morpheme word versus a five syllable word, that could be a way to help readers

process the word more efficiently. You know, we had the example of the pseudo-sseudo hypoparathyroidism, and uh that word sticks out to me now and I could probably get a pretty good stab at spelling that word. The other word that was the state fish of Hawaii, I just I I I'm sure there are morphemes in the Hawaiian language that help make up that word, but

Uh for me as a non-Hawaiian speaker, it's it's 12 syllables. I just don't remember it that well. If I had to decode it again, I definitely could. But I'd probably have to kind of chunk it up by syllables. I'd have to use those reading strategies that I fall back on when uh uh you know when the decoding isn't happening efficiently. So I just appreciate Dr. Kearns opening my eyes to thinking about

polymorphemic instruction or teaching students how to read words that have multiple morphemes. And the benefits of that of being that we get all sides of orthographic mapping, right? We get the morphemes, which is the meaning of the word. We get the phonemes, which is how that word sounds, and we get the graphemes, which is how it's it's spelled.

So I think there's there's some pretty strong implications for that. And and related, yeah, I I I know I'm glowing a little bit over polymorphemic construction and that's because it's it's a new door to me. It's something that I find very, very interesting and intriguing and something I didn't really think about six months ago.

But at the same time, we can't shortchange polysyllabic instructions. In the show, I asked Dr. Kearns, well, which which one's better? You know, which one should we do? And it's not It's either or. It's not well you should choose polysyllabic instruction or you should choose polymorphemic instruction. It's a both and.

Meaning that there are times when polymorphemic instruction might be the way to go. There's times when polysyllabic instruction might be the way to go. And there's a lot of times where those two things are going to overlap. As we be strategic of when we're using which and we be strategic with how we are getting both sides of the reading rope to become a rope, we will be productive teachers of literacy, which I think at the end of the day is the goal that we all want.

That is all I have for you on the show today. Thank you so much for joining the show. You can all of course you can follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get the podcast. And oh as always, feel free to share the podcast with a friend as we keep growing. This is Jake with the Teaching Literacy Podcast, and until next time, let's go and teach reading just a little bit better.