Sight Words and Morphology Linnea Ehri Pete Bowers Kenn Apel

Welcome educators to fulfilling literacy lessons and clarifying conversations. We want to introduce you to the many wonderful and creative people who are turning innovative research into practical lessons. We'll try to clarify many of today's confusing topics, breakdown time consuming silos, and demystified critical components of language, including morphology, vocabulary, sentence construction, and language comprehension. Our goal is to show you how to teach reading, spelling, and writing as one integrated ability, making literacy easier to learn, and saving hours a week for more enriching activities. Our focus will just be on students that receive help from special education and reading teachers, but also disengage students reading at grade level. You'll hear from noted researchers, including Linne Airee, Marcia Henry, and Peter Bowler's. As well as teachers will have developed lessons that engage students in rich language abilities. Check back weekly to discover more fulfilling literacy lessons and clarifying conversations. Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. So welcome to fulfilling literacy lessons and clarifying conversations. I'm Bruce Hallack, a former biology researcher and a special education teacher who is trying desperately to stay retired and it's not working. I've been creating literacy interventions and enrichment programs for the last 25 years. My website is regenshift.com. My co-host is David Ray, a practicing elementary speech language pathologist who is deeply invested in a relationship between language and literacy. Today we would like to clarify topics around one of the most exciting areas of literacy instruction. Morphology and its influence on decoding, sight-word readings, spelling, vocabulary, and about two other thousand things. Our three guests have advanced our understanding and the practice of literacy in these areas significantly. First I'd like to introduce Pete Bowler's who, like me, struggled to make sense of the English writing system and was a terrible speller, even though we taught for nine years. He has always assumed that English spelling was full of exceptions and he had always assumed that it was just a confusing mess. But this confusion faded when he discovered real spelling. A transformational approach to written language. While the effect on spelling accuracy was clear, the most exciting part was discovering how the English spelling system worked to build vocabulary and reading. And I want to emphasize that we're transformational as we just recorded two podcasts with people who use Pete's and other methods and they both voluntarily use that word. That experience led Pete to begin his grad work with John Kirby. There have created four and five vocabulary intervention, introduced the phrase structured word inquiry. That study also introduced morphological binding theory. The Unites phenology, the sounds, orthography, spelling, and word meaning. Today we will discuss key elements of SWI and the matrix and word sums and the generative nature of vocabulary. Pete is internationally recognized for structured word inquiry, which has turned real spelling and morphology into an accessible approach to developing a deeper understanding of words and has personally helped me immensely. Dave, would you like to introduce our next two guests? Yeah, Dr. Linnea Ari is a distinguished professor of educational psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She's a prominent American psychologist and an expert on the development of reading. She's well known for her orthographic mapping concept, which describes how letters sound connections are formed in memory, which then enables fluent reading. Her research has significantly impacted the field of literacy education. Dr. Ken Ople is a distinguished professor emeritus in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of South Carolina Columbia. He has more than 30 years of experience in conducting research in the areas of spoken and written language. Recently his research has focused on the linguistic factors that contribute to the development of reading and spelling, including morphological awareness and orthographic knowledge. He's also done research on early morphological awareness research as well. He was a principal investigator to develop a morphological awareness assessment measurement for students in grades one through six called the matters, which stands for the morphological awareness test for reading and spelling. Dr. Ople is a fellow of the American Speech Language Reaching Association. I had the privilege of having Ken as a professor of mine. Like I said, when I was a graduate student, I'm pleased to always influence my work. I have been helped by Pete and colleagues of Linnea and Ken in a big way and I want to just acknowledge them. During the pandemic, I had been developing lessons for about 20 years, mostly based on phonemic awareness and the relation to orthography. And I was never satisfied with what they were offering my students as well as fixing my issue, who's literacy. Everything was incremental. So a biology friend of mine said that he often just threw out all his material and started over. And I did that and that connected me to a lot of people that were very interested in working based on current research and not on traditions and Pete especially helped me. He spent hours probably days helping me unlearn many of the concepts that I have learned over those 20 years. And I also want to acknowledge Ken's colleague and collaborator, Jan Wasowick, who spent hours also showing me deeply the relationship between language and literacy. And about a few months ago, when I really thought all these lessons had come together, Susan Gray, who wrote the paper Morpho Phenemic Analysis, who was a word reading for adults, certainly in readers, she volunteered to review all my material and I had to throw out or replace or revise the third of them, which I did. So I just want to thank this network of people that we're connected with. Sure, well to start us off, I wanted to ask Ken a question. If you could clarify based upon your recent definition of morphological awareness, what is the distinction between morphological knowledge and morphological awareness? And secondly, how does that definition guide both our instruction and our assessment? First of all, I'll say, you know, I don't know what morphological knowledge is. People use that a lot in different ways, but I'm pretty basic. I say, "Well, morphing is the smallest unit of meaning in our language." And so any kind of attention to or awareness of that is morphological awareness. But it used to bother me and that I would read different papers on morphological awareness and researcher one would use one or two tasks, researcher two would use to the other task, researcher three would use a different task. And there is no commonality among those. And so it got me thinking that maybe it's because morphological awareness is a multi-component skill. And so looking across the research, I said there were four components to morphological awareness. The first one is just an awareness spoken or written morphines, realizing that they're there. The second one is awareness of the meaning of affixes and how they may change the meaning or grammatical class of a base word when they're applied. Third one was awareness of what when some affixes are attached to base words, the spelling of the base word gets modified or changed. And then the last one is the relation between base words and they're in flight and derive forms. That four component models, the one that we used to start thinking about the development of morphological awareness, specifically how you might assess it. And so we used that to guide us in how we developed and tested out the matters, which I think is a really cool term for that. But anyway, we, you all saw this. There is an article we published in 2022, I think, where we gave over 4,000 children between first and sixth grade that eight tasks which were on the matters to further component. And we found out that at East grade, there were these clusters of students that performed differently on these tasks. So you might have one cluster that they did well across the board, another cluster that did lousy across the board. But then you had some clusters where they did well on one and the first and third component, but not on the second fourth component. So not only did that help support this idea that there's four components, but for me, what's important is that it's shown that we can't just assume if you give one morphological awareness task that students can, who does well means they're going to do across well across all these tasks. And my background is focus on students who are struggling. And so I always used to tell my grad students assessment drives intervention. And what you're going to do in intervention or instruction is only as good as what you measure. And so for me, it's important that we have a solid definition of what morphological awareness is because that guides us on what we assess and then also helps us decide what a student's strengths and weaknesses are in there. It morphological awareness. All right. Well, thank you. And I look forward. When will that be published by the way, the matters? I don't forgot to say who knows. Supposedly, supposedly by November of this coming year. So Dr. Erie, research and talked about how important it is for children to learn to read words by site and phonics being a key element of that as well as phoneme of awareness and morphology. Can you talk about a little more detail about the integration of phonemes and graphings and word meanings, how these site words are developed over time, and also how morphology fits into your four phases of reading development model? Well, thank you for your interest here. Well, morphological units include both words and meaning bearing parts of words, including stems and aphixes. How words are stored in memory is portrayed in each of the four phases. First, non-alphabeticly followed by partial graphing phoneme connections followed by more complete graphing phoneme connections, and then the consolidated phase where the alphabetic units that connect spellings to pronunciations are larger multilater units. The phase theory explains how spellings become bonded to their pronunciations and meanings. And orthographic mapping recruits units of the writing system to secure spellings to pronunciations by forming connections between, as I said, graphing phonemes or multilater spellings and sounds. Morphology has been elaborated mostly in my description of the consolidated phase, which is defined as a time when students have acquired knowledge of a sufficient repertoire of multilater units, including morphemic units. And so these have become the predominant type of connection that's used to store sight words in memory. However, these multilater units that include morphemes are certainly used earlier, but the point is they don't predominate until the consolidated phase. Now, in terms of my view of morphology, recently in considering the work of Sue Heggland and Peter Bowers, I've realized that orthographic mapping can also be conceptualized as recruiting units of the morphographic system to connect morphemic units in spellings of words to their meanings and syntactic functions. This bonding is equally important. In the past, I've considered the process of bonding spellings to meanings as an associative process because the connections are not systematic. However, the orthographic mapping concepts involves applying a pneumonic system to store spellings in memory. So the morphographic spelling system qualifies for orthographic mapping. Whenever students encounter unfamiliar words whose meanings can benefit from morphographic analysis, this should be taught systematically. Early on, ED and ING are applied to even primer level verbs, plural-less endings to nouns, ER, EST applied to primer level adjectives, such as "big" or "old." If students are not taught morphographic units, they will decode them phonetically, like "stophead" or "helped." If students learn to read words in sentences where meanings of the words are activated, this may correct phonetic mispronunciations. Partial graphing phoneme connections may be used to remember how to read irregularly spelled words, like "sad" and "does," unless morphographic instruction intervenes. So looking at where morphology has really become so widely published in the last 20 years, it sounds like sometimes people may argue about, "Well, when should we teach morphology, how early on there are some misunderstandings that perhaps are happening?" People are not understanding some of your research. Maybe we'll come back to that later, but I. Right, no, I certainly teaching, even beginning readers, how the morphological units that occur in words help some connect the spellings to the meanings of the words as well as the pronunciation. So sight words aren't sight words unless they have meanings. So getting the meaning ingredient into the picture and bonding it to the spelling is really critical. And it's clear that morphological analysis can contribute to that, but I think it requires instruction. I don't think students are going to discover it on their own. And this. I'm sorry that David Cher focuses on self-teaching as a mechanism because that has suggested to people that you don't need to teach the structure of the writing system that students will discover it on their own and they won't. How many people fail to recognize the relationship between words that have similar stems, even horizon and horizontal. I found people who don't recognize that connection. So. Thank you very much. I. That brings up a lot of topics, but Pete, I want to go back to some of the basic pieces that I had learned working with you and other people including Sue Hagling. One of the things that really shocked me is that every word, virtually every word in every language has a base, has this core element which is morphological and on which every word is a base or is constructed of a base plus a fix. And that really required the type of explicit instruction that Dr. Aries is talking about. And I would like you to elaborate on the binding theory because it's not just morphology. It's the fact that morphology influences phonology which includes decoding, a big part of decoding, I should say, orthography, the spelling system, and word meaning. I like Sue Hagling's word is anchors it, but you use the word binding, I? Yeah, well first of all, I just have to say it's a real honor to get to be invited here along with Linne and Ken and you know, their work has been hugely influential in the whole field and from my thinking and Linne, who really helped me in a correspondence about talking about her that I understood through that, the role of morphology was earlier in her theory than I had previously thought. One of the things that's striking to me when you look at that theory, like is it 1998, I believe, is kind of what we think about that. And morphology was in that theory way back then and it kind of, we have to go back and find it again, which is great that Linne had out there so early. In terms of the binding agent, I'm going to share the screen because there will be a video version, but I will do this in such a way. I hope that it'll actually help me to describe better, to understand the binding agent model. It's probably good to just people will have in their mind the reading triangle, where that is everywhere. The idea where you have the triangle with, you have orthography, the spelling of the bottom left hand corner, and phonology, the bottom right. And so orthography, spelling, phonology, pronunciation up at the top, semantics. And that as Aries model and every model I know says we need to bind to spelling, pronunciations, and meanings of words. We want to get them to this site word. I just loved what you just said that it's not a site word if you don't have meaning exactly. But you also have to have that you want it so that it's automated. Now the thing that when John Kirby and I were doing this work and this came out in the intervention that introduced Dr. Wardenquiry, which was focused on teaching the interrelationship of morphology and phonology, but morphology isn't kind of specified in that model. And what we were arguing is that there's one aspect of the language system that has spellings, pronunciations, and meanings. And that's morphology. And it's really important point because we can make other kind of sublexical pieces like oncets, rhyme, syllables, graphines, and phonemes, and such. But the only one of those that links to spelling, pronunciation, and meaning is morphology. And so that's the and then we're now we're building on prophetes, lexical, lexical quality hypothesis. Because one of the arguments that is central in his work is the more you bind it, not only do you need high quality orthographic representations, high quality phonological representations, high quality semantic representations for a word. I think people get confused about that idea of a representation. And if we just talk about semantics for a second, if we think about the word cat, if you're trying to read the word cat, if the only image you have of a cat is a kitty cat, well, if you're reading a story about cats of the jungle, you have the wrong some man, you don't have a rich enough semantic understanding if you're thinking about kitty cats running around the jungle. So you can have ranges of qualities of these things and the better the quality, the more automated, the more of a sight word you have. But what we're arguing is there's morphology is a way that binds those corners and there's a constituent binding feature of prophetes theory, which states that binding any two corners of the triangle increases the quality of lexical quality of whole word. So the reason we think morphology as this particular importance is because exactly like some of the examples everybody's just talking about if you draw on morphology you can start to see that. So one example is I often use the word does and I think one problem that we typically do is when we think about linking we talk about print and speech but we kind of treat speech a bit like its pronunciation and so when we try to link the spellings of DOE-AS to the pronunciation does and it doesn't follow the normal patterns then we put kids in the position of having to memorize something that only has a couple of common graphing phonic correspondences something that dyslexics really have had bad orthographic memory memorizing is rough but what I'm trying to argue is there's no such thing as speech that isn't both pronunciation and meaning of course that's an areas theory as well. So what we need to think about in this triangle is that actually when we talk about speech the speech that a child comes to nursery school with if they're an English speaker always has both phonology and morphology. If I made a joke to a kindergarten student who just came in if I said to them did you drive to school or were you driven they would laugh because of course they didn't drive but notice they had zero problem knowing that the word drive and driven are related even though the pronunciation changes it's not just the speech isn't just the pronunciation it's the interrelation of pronunciation and morphology that gives us the meaning and so if we look at how the writing system represents pronunciation and meaning we see that graphene links to the phonemes in certain ways but we can see that the D-O in the word does is the same D-O that we have and I do my work where she does her work and once you know to make that shift you can start to see oh I know why to put the O in does and now I have an ES suffix that I also use in words like goes and so we're having the same structure in different places and that's the kind of pattern we can draw and I would argue that there's nothing that binds more powerfully to memory than meaning and so when we can link abstract graphene's and phonemes to something meaningful we can remember it better, so I word but we also want to learn to be able to run into a word and I really like what Lenay was saying about the self-teaching mechanism because I often make the point and I know shared that that doesn't mean don't teach it means that we need to teach in such a way that your mayor wolf would say your biological spotlights are having their attention drawn to how spelling links to pronunciation and meaning including that interrelationship and when you do that when you teach that now when kids are out in the world the self-teaching can happen and I'll just tell one tiny story and then I'll take my turn and that story is a wonderful email that I got from a teacher whose kid came back to class I think she was in grade four or something like that a kid who had really been struggling until studying like this and she runs into teller teacher she can't stop looking at words and she mentions that she was in the shower that morning and saw a shampoo bottle and noticed the word stronger and noticed that in strong you don't hear the G but in stronger you do so if a kid is taught in such a way that they start making connections there's nothing that motivates the child more so a kid who's been struggling who suddenly making connections instead of having another thing to memorize instead of strong and stronger being something that bugs you because it's weird now it's interesting because you know how to look at that so I hope I actually respond into your question I think you did I've talked to many of the speech to print people and I'm not talking about Jan Ossoick and as soon as I say well it's generative they believe that that means you don't have to teach you and in many ways you have to teach this clearly and systematically to get to that point where the kids are generating the meaning the pronunciation the spelling of unfamiliar words which is to me that's the real game third grade on thousands of words you have to generate those three pieces basically on your own I'd like to to get back to Ken at this point because you've also worked on this multi-component integration piece and talk about it widely in your in your papers and Jan Ossoick chooses POMS which is phonology, orthography, morphology the three basic units of words plus slash as the semantically level of the word meaning piece and Susan Gray also used that in the the paper with with Dr. Eric but can you go beyond that and that you emphasize the importance of spelling use the word repertoire how do you develop that interconnected understanding of the word so first of all yes we talk about the repertoire theory for how kids are learning to represent words and what we know is that some folks will go with the idea of the stage theory which says first teach them phonemic awareness or the graphic awareness and morphological awareness whereas the repertoire theory is based on development we know from early early on kids are showing some awareness or attention to three different areas as far as assessment and instruction and eviction goes there isn't any time when you don't think about all of them at the same time now I have a specific learning theory that says we each have so much cognitive ability to tackle any one or more tacit any one time and so I'll say yet you're going to tackle all three at the same time but that's a little bit of a light because in any one lesson I'm only going to tackle one because there'll be a cost of overload but that does mean that I'm not going to wait for something to get to a certain percentage before I move on it just means that any one particular lesson I'm not going to overload the kid by trying to get them to learn some more about phonemes more themes orthographic units and stuff like that and I think I forgot forgot what you were really really asking me I was talking about what constitutes the repertoire and obviously spelling is a key component of that the reinforcement in memory it's spelling provides yeah because with spelling you have to think about all components in order to put it on paper it's a production task it's not a discipline of recognition task and what we know is that I've seen spelling of reading are highly related but spelling is the best way to figure out what a student or doesn't know about each of those in classic areas as far as then to sign well how I can help the student I wrote down I am a speech-to-print person yes I did I didn't want to characterize what you and Jan do with these other people because it's very different because you made a comment about that you don't teach and I think that comes from the notion of and some reading programs would say there's an expectation that I have to teach something and the student has to memorize something right in order to be learned wherein a speech-to-print you're structuring the learning lessons so the student is discovering and I get nervous using that word but discovering whatever you're trying to help that student learn because then it's going to be something that the student has acquired versus me just saying hey buddy this is what you need to know it's still explicit instruction right it's just a different way of doing it so that the student given all the information I've laid out we'll say oh I get with this rule is and then be able to apply it in all different situations it isn't I've heard like guided discovery maybe or yeah different terms yeah because the other part of my of my theory of learning is that we learn best what an expert scaffolds the learning force yeah and so that's what we're trying to do when I say learning is abnormally easy and I make it abnormally easy because with my background I know exactly how something develops in this case the three different linguist corners skills to support spelling and I know to ensure that the tasks are not so much that they overload the cognitive system so but I said it up so there's no way the student's not going to be able to learn it to me a lot of cognitive learning principles include retrieval practice but retrieval practice requires that you teach the child and then the retrieval process pulling that out of memory solidifies the learning were you referring to that or am I extrapolating from what you were saying Ken? no I don't think that's exactly what I was saying so in other words let's say I'm working on a particular morphological rule or pattern and I stretch the situation so the student discovers it I am merely put in a situation where the student house is used in real life reading and writing opportunities right thank you uh I like what you're saying there Ken and there's a recent meta-analysis on direct and inquiry instruction that I think is really interesting and what they found was that inquiry-based instruction was more effective for conceptual knowledge. Right? And then so what I think we're talking the same way, we want we use the inquiry to get the interest, the focus and the the kid to gain control, but then you got to practice right away and apply it to other contexts. So I call it structured inquiry, but there's other people call it other things. But I think your point is really key and I can get you guys the links for that article if people are interested in that from the talk. So going back to the site word, your example of does and what are considered typically site words in beginning reading instruction. Seems like one core component is how morphology explains English spelling so well whereas in more of a traditional approach because they're memorizing at least kids might see sign or does, but they're not really understanding English spelling. And then Peter, I know your idea is the more we can explain English spelling even early on, it better it is rather than a more typical site word approach. And Dr. Eri to get you involved in this too, I know that you've done quite a bit of work on spelling, how spelling impacts vocabulary development, how it impacts reading and decoding and site word development. What would you like to throw in to this the summer relating to spelling? A while ago, I published a paper that talked about reading words and spelling words are like two sides of a coin. The same skills contribute to both. We've got the Neemick segmentation, knowledge of units of the writing system and then storing spellings of individual words in memory. So and all of this needs to be taught explicitly if you want to strengthen student spelling skill. It's notable that Becky Tremendita studied and found that the correlation between reading and spelling words is as high as 0.9 oh and above. I mean, so that means they're almost the same thing. So storing site words in memory involves establishing the spellings connected to pronunciations and meanings through orthographic mapping. So site word learning support spelling and having students write and remember the spellings of words, stores, letter details to form high quality lexical units. Reading and spelling are central to develop together. Do you think with what we people call our regular words? When I was reading your articles today, it was more that when kids are learning letters sound, you know, to sound out words and to get these that words, they're noticing some of those silent letters or those mystery letters. But we're not explaining it. Do you feel like in Peter, you know, if you want us to get involved, that'd be great to just help how important it is it to be able to explain even if it's for talking about irregular words. Well, if the regular words are not explained, students will just form grapho phonemic partial connections to remember how to read the words to store them in memory. But if you can explain them in terms of more for graphic units, how they relate to other words, sign signature, you know, I think that's enable students to remember the more complete spelling of the word because it fits into their structure of connections for other related words. You want to add to that? I, I, I, I very much agree that we're overwhelmingly in agreement on all of this. I think of kids who are struggling with literacy. Let's say, starting with those, those irregular words that can be so frustrating for some kids, some kids just learn them. If we go way back to a version of instruction that I don't, don't know anybody fighting for of whole word instruction, most kids did still learn to read. Like we get way more kids to read once we teach how the writing system works, right? But people do learn. But then there's kids who struggle and I think one of the ways to think about it, we have an, if I have a bad orthographic memory, whatever the sources of that bad orthographic memory, if I get does and sign in all these irregular words, it, it's a burden on me. And it makes it frustrated. It makes me not pay attention. I always say, I don't know any cognitive load greater than shame that comes from kids who keep seeing they're not learning the other things the other kids are learning. And, but if some kids will learn how does it spell without being taught, they can't explain it, but then it doesn't help the kid struggling. So whenever there's an option to explain a word, I think we should, but it's not just that we should explain the spelling of does to help the kid bind the spelling of does, which is important. But it's also that we use it as a systemic way of looking at the whole system. So like right now, we teach about the ED suffix. It got these three pronunciations. We do that all the time. We teach about the S suffix can have the can be can write or we do it all the time. But we kind of treat it like in the general world, we treat that more like a pneumonic device with the same principle that explains the two pronunciations of the S suffix is what explains the DO base in does. It's the same, it doesn't matter but it's a baser of suffix more themes in English, shift their pronunciations, but can keep the same spelling because it marks that spelling meaning correspondence. And the thing is the resources that have been that teachers have been getting haven't been explaining that so they don't know to point to that. I taught does is he regular for my whole life. And I'll just again, I'll just share a page for those who can see of examples of using morphology and I can just explain a couple. One I use all the time and a way that you can tie this into like a classroom situation with the young kids, I could talk about what's your favorite action movie? And we could talk about an actor and acting. You start having the oral language around those words and then I can use words sums in a matrix to show that ACT that base is pronounced act when I say acting or actor, but when I say action, all of a sudden that T is changing and writing. And I don't use an SH now because the SH couldn't write the that. And so if we are having those kinds of conversations with kids right as we start from the oral language, I've done this with young kids in running around once we taught about the T can write, if there's an I or you after it, like an action. And then we go around and they're looking for other words where the T can write and it can write. So that's a graphing phonon correspondence that we need to explain. We teach that the G can write G or it could be depending what's after it. Well, the T can write two different pronunciations. It has the great benefit of helping kids automate words like does because are tied to meaning. But the most important part is it tells the big principle that was absent from everything I'd seen when I when I was teaching. I didn't know any of this until 2001 when I ran into this real spelling that spelling favors consistent spelling of the meaning aspect of speech over the pronunciation, which is so the spelling of the meaning units is more consistent. And then there's the other kinds of things that you mentioned like the W and 2 which we teach. Well, that's a spelling meaning correspondence to words like twice and 20 in between that have a historical connection. But again, we treat that like a numantic device because the same principle explains the O and people, which links to popular population because right now. I'm sorry. Can I wanted to you to also chime in because Peter's talking about morphological instruction early on and you did in 2013 several studies on early morphological awareness in kindergarten and first and second grade. Can you talk about perhaps that that key element of of doing early morphological awareness? Yeah. So when I was at Florida State, we did several studies on helping students kindergarten through second grade that were from schools with very high free reduced lunch for that particular set of studies. We figured we were coming in very early ability for kids to think about morphology. So we picked very simple and functional derivational affixes teach them and lo and behold, they learned. And we think about that study because we had a little first grader who went back to his classroom because that all the kids participated and said to everybody, did you know the can mean more than one? And he was so excited. He had learned that in those studies, we picked affixes that were very early occurring and helped kids learn what those were and then looked at the effects on their morphological awareness and their reading and writing. But at least then said, I always say this spelling is the stronger way to find out what a student knows or doesn't know about the different linguistic awareness skills because you can't guess and go when you're spelling. I know exactly what you're saying, LaNaye, when you use the word "sight words," I think practitioners out there think sight words means here's a word memorize it. First is what you're talking about is developing a strong, what I call, mental graphic representation, NGR strong, in your head based on using your knowledge of sounds, patterns, and meanings. And so I always wonder whether that gets confusing for some other people who have been taught, I have to help this kid memorize the word after word after word. I know. And that's not what you're saying. In fact, I participated in this reading lead summit a few weeks ago, and I was told not to use the word "sightward" getting words into memory to read them automatically. Don't call them "sightward" because people will misinterpret the term. These days whenever I see teachers using movable letters, they say, "Oh, this is teaching kids sight words to do it." And there's a lot of confusion and that's why I think we want to have this kind of podcast. I want to go back to one thing that Pete said, I'm going to throw out and mention that with my material, when the first day that I work with a special aid kid, and they usually are seven-year-olds. I don't often work with six-year-olds just because the way that the school is structured, I give them that act matrix because all the subcomponents read and in and act, they can learn those very quickly. And what I have them do is say, can you figure out some of these words? And I show them action, and I mentioned the shift in pronunciation of the T. And the two things that I get out of it is right away you're able to increase the instruction in the complexity of English. You're not trying to shy away from the complexity of it. You're showing the child, these are key pieces. These aren't exceptions in English language. The other things, as you can start with multi-syllabic, I'm sorry Pete, I use that phrase, we'll call them polymorphemic words on day one with a child. The other thing that it does, Pete and I have talked about it, it empowers the child. They see that they can do a lot more. I do a lot of letters and sound stuff. I use Elkone and Boxes, serial substitutions. The richness of the type of instruction that you're given a child like that is more like an able student than a disabled student. And it changes the relationship that child has to to instructions. And you know, special eight kids spend half their life avoiding instruction. They begin, "Can I come with you instead?" So. Well, I wanted to make sure, so come these insights we have today about morphology and how that has impacted, I know, can I want you to go into this discussion about your spell links to reading and writing, how some of these ideas we're talking about today are enacted into that curriculum. And we've kind of talked about newer understandings with morphology that are different. If you could talk about, in your specific curriculum, but how is it different than maybe what we traditionally think of reading dyslexian type interventions or in getting our structured literacy kind of things? Well, I mean, everything that people have been saying pretty much is consistent with spell links. This is one of my pet peeves. Sometimes, and perhaps is the order killing him, I'm not going to say that, but practitioners let programs decide what the student needs versus the practitioner deciding what the student needs. And I met with practitioners who will say, "Well, I have to do this lesson because that's what's next," even though it's not what the student needs. And in our field, I'd say, practitioners need to be clinical scientists. They need to look at every single child as a brand new case, and what is it we can do to help that particular student progress? And so spell links, based on that, more or less, is prescriptive. It's not saying start with one and go through 10. It's saying, "What does Johnny need? Does he need lesson three, seven and seventeen?" And that's based on your spelling assessments that we just really want to talk, yes, or what's needed. But you don't need to do, you don't need to have either one to be good at helping students develop their literacy skills. It's convenient because it provides lessons. It's convenient because you can decide which of those lessons the student might need. But to me, instruction is only as good as the person who's running it. The belief that person has about learning and what that person knows about literacy. Someone could take a published program of instruction and say, "I'm going to use this, but I'm going to use this part in this part and not feel like they have to be dictated to what they're doing." That drives me up the walls you're probably going to have. I'd like to get back to Dr. Erie for a second and look at this relationship between pronunciation and meaning. And I'm going to reference David Cher's recent universal combinatorial model. And I never use the word combinatorial in public because I even actually Jan was so excited. He should have picked another word. I call it the combining principle. He loves this. But Cher says that language has afford the ability for readers to reach phonological transparency with words. And he calls this a novice level. You see a word, you know, how to pronounce it. And then he says the expert level is morphological transparency. What the meaning of the word is transparent to you. And Cher says, "Groes like a tree." The word of arbitration isn't even a model of a calculator. But he's not saying that these are in conflict. He's saying that these need to develop together. But he is putting an emphasis more on the meaning side than the phonological side. I just wondered what your thoughts about that were, Lenna? I'm not sure he places, I mean, meaning is certainly a big part of the picture. But in his theory, he's talking about, well, let's take the tree analogy. For example, if you look at his theory, the growth of the trunk of the tree involves becoming more efficient at decoding words. You need to process graphing phonemulations and larger units to decode words. And it starts from effortful decoding is his first phase. And then readers need to learn letter sound relations and phonemic awareness to develop their decoding skill. And then once that develops, their decoding skill improves. So the trunk of the tree grows taller. And they use that to establish an orthographic lexicon of sight words in memory. And then once they start doing that, the lexicon of words as the branches moving off of the tree. So decoding is contributing, is helping them to form the sight word of sight. A sight is easy to say. So I'm just going to call it sight words. But the representation, the orthographic representation of individual words that get into memory. That's what I mean by a sight word. As the reader applies decoding skill, those words start to form on the branches. And then as words accumulate in memory, the reader induces or the patterns in the words become part of the reader's orthographic knowledge of the system. And then that in turn supports his decoding of more words. So he's building these branches through his decoding skill. But the trunk of the tree goes from effortful decoding to skilled decoding. And then he's got this super lexical phase where the reader is reading fluently and using the context to accumulate syntactic and semantic information and building that into the meanings of words. What I'd like about this discussion is we're not saying that all these pieces have to be taught differently. That they all come together in a meaningful interrelated, connected way that reinforces each other. Pete, I know that you and Cher exchange fair amount of emails during the process of him writing the paper. Would you like to add a few comments? Well, I just wanted to say, I just appreciate the name's description of that section so much because I've read it many times and that really I think is a lovely illustration of it. And one of the reason that one of the points is is that you don't learn something that have to throw it away to learn something else. If if your learning builds on the combinatorial pieces and the thing is these as you like to call the combining principle, if every new piece you you learn about is actually really in the system, then you're going to encounter it again and can build on it. Example of this, we often think about the morphology side of this or the graphene and the morphemes in those pieces. One thing we understand is that also graphene phoneme correspondences are combinatorial. Yes. And so my example, I always use the act matrix because I don't know anybody teaching that the tea graphene is a common way of writing "shh" and I think there's a good reason for it's because people are teaching the graphene phoneme correspondences without marking the morphemic boundaries. So we call "ti" the "di-graph" but it can't be a ti-di-graph because the "t" is in the base and the "i" is in the suffix. And so I'm just going to share my screen again and I will make it so you don't need to watch the screen to get it. But to understand the combinatorial thing that Shares talking about the language system that's been around for a long time, I was unaware. The idea is that we have these raw materials of the alphabetic letters. Notice this Roman alphabet letters, they aren't English letters. They have no meaning. They're not even English. The "i" letter is in Italian. It's in Spanish. It's in all these Roman alphabet languages. So the thing that I've found so helpful for me by working with this, I learned from real spelling this idea that the letters are just raw materials. And the letters nest into the graphene. Now when you get to graphene's, one, two or three letter combinations, even though it might look exactly the same, like the letter "y" is also the graphene "y". They're the same name. They look the same. But the graphene "y" acts specifically in English the way the graphene "y" works in English is no longer a letter. And then those graphene, so I'm working with right here with the word healthy from a video that I made with Marie on this, Marie Fouley. And so the letters we can now look at English. So in the word healthy, we have the "h" graphene, the "e" graphene, the "l" graphene that make the base. And then we have the "th" graph for one of the suffixes, and a "y" graphene for one of the suffixes. Because this combinatorial point, there's a limited number of smaller pieces. We can memorize the graphene's and the graphene's phoneme. There's not so many that you that is not learnable. But that means that the thing that's so key is that those graphene's then go into the morphemes. So we have an "h" and "e" and an "l" those graphene's, those three graphene's are my base. And then I can go all the way up to the word healthy. Now the morphemes come together. But notice when the "h" "e" "a" "l" is pronounced one way and healthy and another way in heel. And the "e" choice of the "e" a" graph. The reason is there, there's a whole bunch of reasons, etymological other reasons. But we need the spelling. We need the graphene phoneme correspondences, not just for the pronunciation of the word healthy. We need the graphene phoneme correspondences of the base in the word healthy that can also represent the pronunciation of where it is in other places. Which is what we teach kids when we teach the ed suffix. It can be "t" or "id" when we say "jumped". I can say the kid jumped over the fence. Well that is a phoneme and it's a morpheme, right? But I know I don't use the "t" because it's telling me there's a spelling meaning correspondence of that "ed" to tell me the base happened in the past. And so if we draw attention to those things, each of these combines in the system. And so I don't know if I've gone off of what you're asking. But of course I have to criticize and that Dr. Riebber wrote up the super-electrical level. Because this is actually central. We are trying to get to the site word. We want to look at the word healthy and not have to analyze it morphologically, phonologically or anything. We just want to see that letters, those letters on the page, and have instant access to the reading or if we're writing, we want to think the word healthy and not think just how the letters come out. That's when it's really a sight word. And the thing about that is we need to build a sight word. We need to build your access to the meanings of words because then if you don't, you will have no cognitive space for the super-electrical. Once we automate words, now we have cognitive space whereby we can actually start to make the connections and meaning across the words in the sentence. So Marie Foley and I can dint you to put that super-electrical into the graphics. Yeah, no arguments there. And actually I've been more interested in the super-electrical connection of late. Including, I was mentioning early with Ken's paper, identifying these different features of morphological awareness and have differing effects, one finding that was so interesting to me was I think you were reporting good when and all's work about how being able to identify and manipulate affixes was a bigger, had a bigger correlation to reading comprehension than being able to make words out of the more themes of words. I thought fascinating, but just right there, if accessing the right, the appropriate affix for the part of speech is a facilitating effect for reading comprehension, if we have a taught explicitly those kinds of things with matrices, word sums and all of that, then when you're reading, you're getting those signals more automatically without having to expend cognitive processing to note it. So there's, it's not just that you have more cognitive space for reading comprehension, I think that you're actually able to grasp meaning cues that also influence the syntactic kind of learning. Yeah, that means it's all pulled together, but ultimately you don't even know, take the word light, it could be a noun, a verb, an adjective, you don't know until you get to. I don't even know which light you mean. Right, until we get to, you know, put it in a phrase and put it in a sentence, you know, my goal, as you know, is day one, they're also going to be writing and reading some kind of sentences. If I can, sorry, I didn't wrap right there, but that's one of the beautiful first early things I do in kindergarten. Yes. Like, I'll be at a school and I'll sit on the carpet and the kids are coming in, they've never met me before, they may never have any less than an interview just before. And I say, "Come over here, I can't hear you." And usually somebody gets the joke. And if they don't, I raise it up. Oh, wait, that's funny. I just said, "Come over here." Like, "No, you can't hear you." Oh, those are two different words, aren't they? That's funny. They're called homophones. Homophones for saying the phone part is for sound. So like a telephone, you can hear from far away. And then I say, "Well, do you know, so I can hear you as one word, but because it hears another, do you know other ones like that?" And then we get a whole bunch of two and two and two and ice cream, you scream for ice cream, you know. I want you to see what I get to see. Now, when we look at those words, they already know about that. And when I write the word, let's say, take the word rose, R-O-S-E or R-O-W-S. And then you can start to look, "Hey, they're spelled differently." And I got to say one of my favorite things is, I get to the end of this. We find all these homophones. We investigate two words. It sound the same, but spelled differently. And we show why they are. If it was rose, I would have shown, "Oh, that S there is telling me it's more than one row." But in R-O-S-E, there's an E there, so that can't be more than one. That's the flower one. So we can talk about it. But the thing that I say is, "Well, here's something. Those two words sound the same. Why aren't they spelled the same?" And if you introduce kids to that story like that, and you've already shown them the different spellings, they never saw this. They didn't know how to read them. They still don't know how to read them. But I ask them, they can see their spell differently. When I ask them why, he says, "Well, because they mean different things." Because it would be confusing if they were spelled the same. And what I find so fascinating there is that if the instruction reflects the nature of print representing the pronunciation and meaning of speech, you illustrate it with homophones so powerfully. Because if it was just pronunciation, they would be spelled the same. And then you can go on treasure hunts for homophones, which makes the kids look closely and see the differences of spelling, and you're building the orthographic mapping along the way when you're talking about the graphing phonic correspondences and the meanings of words. So I just wanted to highlight for that introduction to just the grand scheme of the writing system. The classes I've taken from you, there are so many insights about how English spelling works. It's shocking how we don't know. And just that we can explain in English is not crazy. And it just feels like in the world of education, I work in a school district, there's so much knowledge about orthography and morphology that we just don't have. It's not widely dispersed. Well, you guys are trying to get it out there. So much is about the traditional view of reading instruction. But I think all of you have done such great work helping us understand. And then today Lenay, well, you've come on and really helped clarify for people, we do have to integrate morphology more and people who say it's phonics first and morphology weights. It doesn't seem like that's really where anyone should be at. Can you want to speak to that? When you're talking about beginning reading, Affects is like I-N-G-E-D. I mean, those Affects are added to base words. And these are the words that students need, graphing phonic connection. to read the single syllable words, CBCs. So graphing phoneme knowledge is needed to be able to read those words that you're adding affixes to and talking about derived forms of the words. Well graphing phonemes are part of, that's how English is written. Those are the basic units of the writing system. So you have to address those when children learn to read. They have to learn letters, they have to learn the sounds that letters represent, etc., all the foundational skills. And when do we give you the last words? Give them the last words. More apologies, important. It's interesting because all the discussion about changes and pronunciation depending on if there's a affix added or not, all that. You know, I think historically a lot of people have gone with the notion that inflections are easier than derivations. And I would have said that was true until we did a study that said it wasn't affix type at all. It was transparency. You know, and so transparency meaning, in fact, there's a derived word, looks and sounds just like the base word. And then you have words that have shifts, SHIFT, either phonological or the graphic, and then some that have both shifts, transparency is much more important than as far as difficulty goes, is much more important than the affix type. Pete, you've got it. You have one more thing to say. We'll give you a minute. I do. And I really emphasize what Ken was just saying. And I remember reading Carlisle's stuff about shifts in pronunciation, meaning and spelling or what get in the way. And the thing about inflections is, well, there's no semantic shift, but there can be pronunciation and spelling shifts, right? So it's really the level of shift between items regardless of inflection or deviation. I'm so glad to hear you say it because I used to drive me crazy. I just wanted to highlight one thing. We were talking about these misconceptions like, you know, shares, self teaching. One thing that is a very common misapprehension about SWY is that the emphasis on morphology is somehow in some competition with the graphing phonic response. And one thing I just wanted to highlight as an illustration, just with the same example again, how we use the morphology to improve the graphing phonic response. And for example, if I'm teaching about act and actor and action, I get the kids to say act. And now I can say, well, what do you feel at the end of it? And you feel that little, you feel your tongue touch act. And then when I get to say action, I can help you see that you don't feel that. So that's it. That's a, when you say act, what do you feel? Do you feel that, do you feel your tongue touching? Or is it like a, and so you can use the morphology as a means of contrasting two different phonemes. And that, and that's what we do in other places, right? We don't teach triangles for a year and then introduce the circle that contrast of two things that are similar, but different in a way is a way to, to, to heighten that attention. And by tying meaning to that process, we are building what I'm arguing is a combinatorial graphing phonic response. The T can write, but it can write, and now when I'm around the system, I'll run into that. I'm using morphology and etymology to bring meaning to give better instruction to graphing phonic responses. I wanted to simplify that because you know, Pete, no, you know, I have to, I speak to brand new teachers all the time, and especially special ed teachers, they're only going to be in the field for two or three years. So you want to get them up to speak really when you're doing the say the go goes gone, do, does, done. It is a very powerful phonemic awareness activity as well. I just want to thank all of you for this wonderful discussion. I think it doing what the goal of this podcast is to clarify a lot of complex issues. And also, I think, remove the silos. So much instruction is in silos. And this integration piece is really a way to make teaching a lot easier. And you can say that. Mel Duke says you can save three hours a day if you, if you integrate. But thank you very much. Ken, thanks for all you've done for this in literacy and speech language pathology. Appreciate that deeply. Linnea, what an honor to have you on today. Peter, I look forward to learning morphimio. Thank you very much. - Thank you so much. It's been really interesting. (laughing) - Thank you.