Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Kate Winn: Hello to all you travelers out there on the road to evidence-based literacy instruction. I'm Kate Winn, classroom teacher and host of IDA Ontario's podcast Reading Road Trip. Welcome to the show. This is the 6th episode of season three.
Before we get started, we would like to acknowledge that we are recording this podcast from the traditional land of the Mississauga Anishinaabe. We are grateful to live here and thank the generations of First Nations people for their care for and teachings about the earth. We also recognize the contributions of Métis, Inuit, and other Indigenous peoples in shaping our community and country. Along with this acknowledgement, and in the spirit of truth and reconciliation, we'd like to amplify the work of an Indigenous artist. And this week we are sharing the picture book The Bee, written by Becky Han and illustrated by Tindur Peturs.
When the narrator of this fun and silly book is startled by the buzzing of a bee, she sets off on an adventure that sees her running from community to community, trying to lose her buzzing companion. When she has run clear across Nunavut, she finally realizes that perhaps this little bee isn’t such a fearsome foe after all. Add this one to your home or classroom library today.
In each episode this season, we're also going to share a review for Reading Road Trip from the Apple podcasts app. And this week we want to thank Retrodictionary who kindly posted the following this podcast provides a refreshing change in perspective compared to other literacy podcasts. It's great to understand these issues in the Ontario context.
Thank you Retrodictionary and everyone who leaves us a rating or review, every single one is very appreciated. And now on with the show.
[00:01:52] Kate Winn: I am just thrilled to introduce our guest this week here on reading a road trip. Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer is a professor in literacy in the School of Education at Virginia Tech. She has studied beginning reading materials, text difficulty, and struggling readers since 1999. Her research has appeared in Reading Research Quarterly, the Educational Researcher, Elementary School Journal, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. She has written and directed eight grants aimed at improving reading instruction in K - 5 classrooms. Dr. Mesmer is the author of several books, a couple of which we will be speaking about today. Her research has been supported by a National Academy of Education Spencer Foundation and an American Educational Research Association Institute of Education Sciences grant. She is the recipient of the Outreach Award from the College of Liberal Arts and and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech and the Promising Scholar Award from the School of Education, Virginia Tech. She is regularly called upon by states and professional organizations and podcasts like ours to speak, and in that case, deliver lectures in her area of expertise. Welcome, Dr. Heidi Anne Messmer.
[00:02:59] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Thank you so much. I'm really honoured to be here. It's so exciting to see the teacher leadership around translating research and to see people taking this on and doing so very seriously and thoroughly. So being asked to be on these podcasts, yours especially, which has such a strong following, is really truly an honour. And I'm very thankful for that opportunity.
[00:03:29] Kate Winn: I appreciate that. Thank you. And before we get into all of the literacy questions, although this is kind of about literacy, I do want to mention you have a double name. And I will apologize because for years when I spoke about your work, I think I just said, you know, Dr. Heidi Mesmer, and then I know you know all the things that you can learn on social media. I remember seeing you on Twitter or slash x mentioning about being a double name person and how a lot of people just assume it's a middle name and they'll just call you by your first name. And so I'm very, very careful about that and making sure that all of our listeners know it is Heidi Ann when we're not calling you Dr. Mesmer.
[00:04:00] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah. Double names are kind of fraught because they kind of have a southern history and people feel uncomfortable with certain parts of that southern history very smartly because there's some really ugly stuff at the same time. The Ann part of my name comes from my mother who's named Anne, and so I like to retain it. And I'm picky. I don't want to hyphenate. So it is an important and special part. And calling people by the names that they want is so important. So I appreciate that as well.
Yeah. So I'm really excited.
[00:04:37] Kate Winn: Okay, well, here we go. Let's dive into some questions. So first, I want to start with your book, Big Words for Young Readers, teaching kids in grades K to 5 to decode and understand words with multiple syllables and morphemes. So this is part of the Scholastic Science of Reading and Practice series, which is so great. We've had some other authors from this series on the show. So as the subtitle says, it's geared for students as young as kindergarten, but it goes right through fifth grade. And we're kind of hoping with this episode to focus a little bit on reading beyond the earliest years. And you've written several things that are going to help us with that. But because we tend to do, we tend to focus a little more on those early years. So for this first question, thinking about students who have already learned to decode short words. What does research tell us about teaching them to tackle multisyllabic words?
[00:05:27] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Okay, so I. There's so much that I want to say about this. This answer is going to go a little bit larger, but I do have notes here, so I'm going to kind of stick to it. So hang on. Okay, so first thing I just want to say is, in all of your questions, one of the things that I really liked is you kept talking about research, research, research. And one of the things I find when I do these podcasts is that the conversations educate me on how to translate information, and they also draw me back into. Okay, what does the research say? What studies specifically? I write these books really very specifically, so that a citation at the end of a sentence really does support what's in that. Or if you see methods or things to do, you can often go back to the actual study, look in the methods section and see that was the instructional sequence that those researchers used. And so I'm thankful for you drawing that back in this towards. As I answer this, I'm going to name specific studies and readers. Listeners can go to the book and they can read those citations so people can really know. I'm connecting to specific studies. A couple of quick things I want to note about big words for young readers, because there's some kind of things I did very specifically. First of all, I use the term big words for young readers. Use the term big words to kind of encapsulate the two different ways that words can be big in that they can have multiple syllables. And in just a minute, I'll talk about the difference between a syllable and a morpheme. And they can have multiple morphemes. Right. And so I also kind of decompose that into reading and understanding, because when you get into words that multimorphemic with those meaning units in them, you have to, it's not just decoding the word, but knowing how that prefix at the beginning of a word, like pre-treatment, changes the meaning. And prefixes actually consistently changed meaning in one of three ways. Little teaser there for the book, if you want to know what those are.
But I'm going to also say something kind of in reference to we are going to keep it on the older kids side here. And I love that focus. But I do want to say one of my big agendas in this book is that we think about big words, if you will, in a K-5 way, in a vertically aligned way, so that kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd grade teachers all kind of know this language, kindergarten, 1st, 2nd, 3rd graders. Teachers should know that word morpheme. It should be part of professional language. It should be as fluid as phoneme.
So the divide in the literature between teaching kids to decode words that are short in K-2 and then pivoting in 3 - 5 to just to teaching them big words, in my opinion, is kind of a false dichotomy. Certainly in fourth grade and above, 60% more or more are going to be big words. But there are big words in young, in little kids work, and you can do things appropriately. So, for example, up to 40% of the words in first-grade texts have more than one syllable. Do you know that you can't eat first grade without getting into multiple, some not running babies? A recent study compared basal reading series in first and third grades. These were 2013 basals, and this was a study done by Kearns and Hiebert, and they found that 48% of all words had more than one syllable. 48% of first-grade materials had more than one syllable. The majority of those words had only two syllables. About 11% had three, and then the remaining had more than three. But a lot of those words were compounds. They had simple inflections, like ing. They had ed on the end, or that ly or ionization. So teachers are already really teaching some of this, but I'm just drawing attention to the fact that there is not a separation.
Kids need a big words mindset right away. They need to know that the second layer of English spelling is morphology.
We've been concentrating so much on graphene phoneme relationships, and we teach them that, hey, these symbols represent sounds. That's how it works. And they do, except for the fact that there's this morphological layer. There's a morphological principle, and it basically says that morphemes, which are meaningful word parts, it's the smallest unit of meaning in a word. It can be a real word like cat, or it can be a word part like SDHe. The s adds meaning, it tells us not one, or it can be ing. So we can teach kids right away that these word parts are visually spelled consistently, even if they sound differently. Do you see what I'm saying?
[00:10:39] Kate Winn: Oh, yes. Because of the s ending. We do that in kindergarten, where we talk about adding the s to pluralize. Sometimes it's going to sound like s, and sometimes it's going to sound like this is right.
[00:10:48] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Exactly. And so what you're teaching there is morphology. Every time we add an s, we add an s, not a z, because we are going, there's a visual kind of spelling component, and we should be doing that right away. And we can teach kids decodable compounds and the like. So the morphological principle is that words that have similar morphemes, those are spelled consistently even if the sounds differ.
And just quickly, you know, it's important to remember that a syllable is a sound unit. And it's not exactly the basis of our spelling system, but a morpheme, which is often a syllable, is the basis. So it's important for kids to kind of understand morphemes. That's the second layer.
And all multisyllabic morphemes are not polymorphemic. In other words, you can have a word with multiple syllables. That's only one meaningful unit. So can you think of one like that? Like multisyllabic, but it only has one meaningful unit.
[00:11:56] Kate Winn: Is it. I think I've seen elephant as an example.
[00:11:59] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Right? Because it's not like the ele part tells us a pachyderm, and the phant part says with a long nose. Right. You can't separate those out. It's all one.
And then there's occasional situations where you, like, have an s on the end where you have two morphemes in a word, but it's only one syllable, so it's like. But most of the time a second syllable is going to add a morpheme. So with a general rule of thumb, what we want kids to do is find the morphemes in words because that's the real layer of meaning in a word. And I'll just quote this real quickly and then I'll answer your question.
[00:12:37] Kate Winn: That's great. This is all awesome information. Thank you.
[00:12:39] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah, this is exciting. So one of the things that I think Duke and Cartwright point out in their kind of expansion of the simple view into the active view, they kind of talk about these processes that kind of take place in the middle of, like, decoding and comprehending, and they talk about morphology being one of them. They say, importantly, morphological awareness provides a clear counter to the notion that we can develop reading simply by working on word recognition and oral language. As morphological awareness has a particular meaning value in written text.
So if you know how to decode the morphemes, you start to learn what the meaning is. So what the research tells us about. That's your question. What does the research tell us about syllables and morphemes? Morphological instruction? So morpheme, again, the smallest unit of sound that adds meaning to a word. It can be a word part that can't stand alone. That's a bound morpheme. Ing, ed, ment can be a whole word like a free word. So there are several meta analyses, one done by Goodwin and Ahn, one done by Bowers and Kirby and Bowers et al. and there's more. And they basically just tell us that when kids are taught morphological instruction, they get better. In morphological instruction, they often improve in phonological awareness, vocabulary and spelling. Now, the Goodwin and Ahn series of meta analyses said that there was not an effect on fluency or reading comprehension, but other studies have found there is an impact. And Bowers et al. found the same thing that we're going to find impacts on spelling, reading, vocabulary and morphology. So we know that this instruction is important, we know that it helps, and that meta-analysis is from lots and lots of studies, usually tens and sometimes even more than that. So the second layer of research is, well, how do you do it? What does the research tell us about research-tested instruction and research test that I'm using that Duke and Martin like, they talk about research-based, which is like we put together a program using different pieces of research to kind of identify components versus research-tested. Here is an entire instructional routine, step by step. Here's how we did it. And we tested it. So there's several studies that did that.
There's a study by Jim Bauman and colleagues in the AERJ journal that focused on instruction with fifth grade students.
That study was really interesting because it used a scope and sequence that grouped prefixes by meaning and frequency. So it taught like number prefixes together. Uni, pre, tri.
There's a series of studies by Lavette et al. which was used with struggling readers and that used a number of word strategies, including some vowel flexing, which is not necessarily morphological. But it also used that spy technique, which is seek the parts, you know, or peeling off. Peeling off. These are, you know, problem solving techniques. When you come to a word, you don't know what to do. Find the base word, peel off the prefix, peel off the suffix, or seek parts. You know, there's two really good studies by Jessica Toste, which I just really love because they so specify what would be useful. These are with kids who are struggling in, you know, 3rd, 4th, 5th grade, I think maybe even middle school, I'm not sure. But their strategy was the first thing they did was they reviewed vowel patterns with their students. So they reviewed the vowel patterns in the single syllable words like the EA and the oo and the Oy. Because obviously, if you can't read basic graphemes in single syllable words, you can't read a multisyllabic word. If you come to delightedly and you don't know ight, you're out of luck. Right. So the foundation of big words is really solid little words instruction. Then they had kids practice, just practice reading high frequency affixes. They just put the affixes out there. Ment tion sion, p r e un, you know, all of those. And they just practiced reading them. And then they had kids, they put kids cards and they had kids blend words together. So if I have untreatable. Put it together, untreat, untreatable, right.
And then they ask kids to isolate affixes and words while being timed. So they would give kids like a list of, these are the affixes, you know, up in the top. And then they would give them a list of words with those affixes. So let's say they put pre up there and re up there. Then there would be words like preamble or retreat, and they would have to go and find those parts to get really quick with spotting how to break them up. Then they pulled it all the way. They had them spell dictated spelling. Right. The affixes write affixed words. Then they had them practice reading, timed reading of the words with different parts. And then they put those words in complex text. Well, guess what? This isn't really rocket science. This is almost exactly what you would do in a high-quality phonics lesson, right?
You're just doing it with big words. You're reviewing systematically, you're blending.
They didn't do any phonemic awareness because that wouldn't have been appropriate.
They're reading the words in isolation and they're spelling them and reading the whole principle in word instruction, if you will, and you probably agree, is it's take it apart, build it up, take it apart, build it up. I mean, that's, that's kind of the idea. So there is a very long answer to what does the research tell us about doing it? And then what does the research tell us about how to do it?
Oh, one last thing. Great work on cognates for multilingual learners. Great study by Carlo Wedal that that cognates are words from different languages that share similar spellings and meanings. So like air, aria, fresh, fresca, information police, and even German because English has a Germanic base. Right.
Finger gast for guest.
Yep. So. And then there's lots of great research-informed how-to articles as well. So there's great research. It's not perfect, but it's there.
[00:19:42] Kate Winn: Excellent. Thank you. That was a very thorough response. The next thing I was going to ask you more specifically about morphology, but have you covered everything you wanted to say about morphology?
[00:19:50] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Morphology, no follow up in that response.
[00:19:53] Kate Winn: So do we know from research in terms of how to best teach morphology? I mean, you gave a few great examples of instructional ideas there. Is it like phonics where there's no best scope in sequence? Like we haven't narrowed it down to a perfect way to do it yet? Or are there any sort of hard and fast things that we do already know about instruction of morphology?
[00:20:14] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah, I think I, there's a wonderful researcher in UK, Rastle, who has done a lot of the primary work in this area and great, great work. And basically my understanding of the consensus is it's not quite as clear the development of so kind of what I talk about in the book as in terms of like, okay, so then what do you teach and how do you guide yourself? Well, obviously you can use these instructional practices that have been research-tested because we do know those work.
But one thing you can do is think about the words that are going to be showing up in text, right?
So inflections are going to show up in first grade text. You just have to teach them. If the kids are supposed to read them, you've got to teach them.
And inflectional suffixes are a smaller group than derivational suffixes. There is research developmentally that tells us that, like England did a study that and several others have done studies that say derivational suffixes. So those are suffixes that change the part of speech, ment tion ize, all of those analyze, you know, etcetera. Those do tend to have kids become aware of those in third grade and then that's going to really take off into high school and career. Those kinds of words, if you think about them like, I see a logic, all of those, those are what I call they laterally or horizontally expand a word so you can use it syntactically in different ways. They change part of speech. So that I think is clear.
I know Amanda Goodwin's done a lot of work on kind of word detectives and that. So I do think there's enough data out there to guide us. And by the way, I don't know that we can even say with a scope and sequence for phonics that there's one golden one.
[00:22:16] Kate Winn: No, exactly.
[00:22:17] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: You can like teach. Like, I've seen studies that Pat Vadasy did where she taught little kids multi letter graphemes early on, which is not typical. Right. But she did that so I think the idea is that at least you have a scope and sequence and you're being clear. And there's another thing. I think that's a principle that is like, have kids decode and explain the words, have them try to spell them, have them reading them in context.
The thing to remember about morphemes, especially bound morphemes, is that you have to kind of show kids what they are so they can find them, because the base words, they already know, but, you know, if they don't know, to take apart these other pieces.
Does that make sense?
[00:23:09] Kate Winn: It does, yeah. Yeah. And I was so lucky. I had the opportunity. This year. I teach kindergarten. That's my, that's my main classroom. But the colleagues at my school are so open to different things, and we're, you know, creative and collaborative. So I did some morpheme instruction in the fourth and fifth grade combined class for the last couple of months of school, which was neat because I got the opportunity to, of course, we are starting this in kindergarten, right. But I got the opportunity to do some of this at a higher level, which was fun, too. So, next question for you. So we know that as kids get older, decoding gaps can grow.
Now, I'm hopeful that with what we're seeing here in Ontario, with the Right to Read, with our improved Tier 1 instruction, improved assessment and early intervention, all of that, that fewer students will be affected by this when they're older. We're certainly not seeing a steep decline yet, but we're hoping for that. You wrote a really interesting viewpoint piece for the Reading Teacher called time in text differentiating instruction for intermediate students struggling with word recognition. So this question is just going to be an easy one. Here in Ontario, intermediate is what we refer to as our grade seven to ten division. When you're talking about intermediate in this piece, what grades are you referring to?
[00:24:22] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah, most of the time, US, we think grades three to five.
So the article is not necessarily written for a secondary learner, although I'm sure many of the principles could be the same.
But no, that's what I'm talking about. Good.
[00:24:39] Kate Winn: So we're talking about three to five. And in this piece you refer to, and I'm using air quotes here, grade-level texts. So again, just a bit of a definition before I continue on, what you mean when you're writing about grade level, you've got an excellent definition that you included in here. And I ask just because the word levels is a bit taboo now, because of the past practice of leveling kids based on arbitrary systems and that sort of thing. So what do you mean in this piece when you're talking about kids accessing grade-level text?
[00:25:10] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah, and I can do that real quick, but I just want to kind of off road about the term level, because I think there's two layers. Right. There's just level, as in a very generic term, and I think we can use that term.
I think that the taboo has become with the Reading Recovery, Guided Reading levels that were broadly applied to text content that in the US was being used by the majority of schools, which was working fine, probably in the upper grades, but it really wasn't conducive to a lot of real reading in the early grades because there just wasn't enough support.
So I used that term several times in the article, and I'll go through a couple times. I open with.
So, in the US, one of the things that's happening here is it's certainly happening in my state of Virginia, is that there's this notion that we should not confine kids thinking and comprehending to only what they can decode especially if they're way behind. Right.
There's not so much you can get out of a decodable text from a comprehension standpoint unless you're using. There's some that are a little more complex. So what we're seeing is this notion that there are two things that are going on. One, a lot of comprehension instruction is happening in a read aloud so that kids can access rich ideas. And then the other thing that's happening in our, like, it's an intervention kind of thing. And the state is basically saying kids have to be exposed to grade level text. So this little anecdote comes from the story.
They were following a state plan, doing high intensity tutoring in small groups with intermediate grade students struggling with reading. And fourth grade teacher shared a concern that when something like this. Okay, this high intensity tutoring requires us to do the intervention using on grade level content. And those are terms that are written into the regs.
But I have fourth graders who are reading on a first grade reading level. Are we supposed to read grade level texts or am I supposed to just read it to them?
That's fine if I'm going to read it to them, but at what point do they practice reading themselves? So there's the kind of tension that a lot of teachers in the text. I define grade level materials in the way that Freddie and I did in a study we did. Grade level text is reading material that aligns with the reading comprehension and word recognition expected of the average student at a particular level, which in this state was, I mean, in this country, was set up with the common core.
Common core had a huge text complexity staircase that specified the difficulties of materials or the range. So it's kind of aspirational. But I would also say grade level materials might also reflect the difficulty of a material that a kid would be asked to read at the end of a grade on a state outcome.
So that's kind of what I mean there.
I'm really just using kind of other people's notions. One really like, what's the goal? What's the aspiration? What would kids be asked to read on the state test?
What would the average kid be asked to read? That's kind of what I mean there. But you're right, it can mean a lot of different things.
[00:28:44] Kate Winn: So I will get to some questions about how to access that grade-level text. But there's another definition I just wanted to ask you about first, because you mentioned Common Core, and I think the term complex texts has been used for a while longer in the states than it has here. It's not as familiar in our standards or curriculum, and it often comes up when referring to older readers. So could you also just define that term for us before we continue? When we see the term complex text, what do we mean by that?
[00:29:10] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Right, right.
So it's funny because in 2012, Freddie Hiebert, and Jim and I wrote an article called a model of early grades text, and we differentiated the terms text difficulty and text complexity. So we kind of said that the text difficulty was based on some kind of predictive performance indicator of how a reader or multiple readers would do so. The difficulty was like an estimate that a kid around third grade would be able to read and comprehend. That difficulty for us is like, involves a reader and a criterion variable. For us, text complexity was more about what is in the text. What are the text features? Does it have long sentences where there are big leading phrases? Though she didn't like baseball, she went to the game anyway. So that's an obviously complex sentence because the subject-verb-object core, she went anyway, is preceded by a long leading clause that basically modifies. The main idea is that she didn't go to the baseball game. Kids who are not real understanding of those parts will think, oh, she didn't want to go. That's the idea. No, although she didn't want to go, she went anyway. The big idea is she went anyway. In complex text, it's going to be a matter of the vocabulary, the coherence, the cohesiveness. Text cohesion is another thing that's not talked about a lot, but that's the various elements that maintain a thread of repetition and anaphoric relationships and connectives and all of those things. So complexity is text features that are in the text, and difficulty is kind of a predictive relationship, an estimate of how. How a kid would fare in this. And.
Yeah. Does that help?
[00:31:14] Kate Winn: Yeah, it does. Thank you. In this piece, you refer to use the term mediating. So mediating word recognition in these grade-level texts for kids. So what I understand that to mean, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is helping to make the words themselves more accessible for the kids who are not independently reading at grade level.
When should we do this, and what are some ways of doing it, of kind of mediating this for the kids?
[00:31:40] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: And so there's two things that I talk about in that text. It's like, okay, the text is hard, but it's close enough that there's things you can do to help them do the word reading mostly, and then the text is too hard. Them doing the word reading is just not going to amount too much comprehension. And what I really tried to do is draw on the research. It was hard.
It landed some bullet points. So this is kind of the main thrust of that. So when. When can you. And then I'll talk about how. When is the text hard, but it's not so hard that you can't help them get to the words. So the research suggests that with beginning readers, that is a smaller kind of thing. Right.
With beginning readers, they need to be really fluid in the more basic vowel graphemes. Really? Right. So there was a study that Linnea Erie did that found that multilingual learners comprehended and read words best when they had 98% to 100% word accuracy levels. So if you've got beginning multilingual learners, they're going to have to be pretty accurate.
In a similar study by Vadasy and Sanders, they looked at, they were doing an intervention, and they broke down every word in the text to see where was the cut point, where if kids didn't know a collection of patterns, it messed up their comprehension. And they found that, you know, you really kind of had to know pretty much through our controlled verbs, vowels. And then after that, if you had heavily inflected forms or if you had, you know, unusual vowel graphene, it was really hard. So beginning and struggling readers, the wind is smaller.
One thing to think about is that if you've got kids who are kind of over that bump and they know most about graphemes. Maybe you're in third grade, you got a text and it's estimated to be like at a third grade reading level, and you got a kid who reads at about a second grade reading level.
The standard error of measurement in readability formulas is plus or minus almost a whole grade. So it usually means that you could probably bridge a grade level difference with some techniques. So you could probably get that second grader, you know, over the hump with some techniques that I'll talk about in just a minute.
And kids can, you know, if they initially recognize about 80% of the words, you can still work that as well. But you got to have a lot of rereading. They can start at 80%. There's got to be a lot of rereading, and there's got to be an adult to pronounce some of those unknown words. Basically, you have to do it for them. But if they don't have those things, an adult around or not, a lot of rereading, 80% is not going to work. And two grade levels ahead seems to be a deal breaker as well.
So, you know, it's like if they're beginners, proceed with caution. They need to really know a lot. If they're not beginners, if they're somewhere in the middle, you might be able to broach a gap of about one grade level. You could do 80% if that's your standard, but you're going to need to help them a lot and reread in terms of what you can do. Repeated reading, the fluency oriented text is good. You reread the text several times across a week. You can also do the quad set text that Sarah Lupo has talked about, which is you get text with different levels of difficulty. And the cool thing, honestly with that is so like, she starts with a really hard textbook. Like, let's say you're doing science and the planets. She starts with the hardest, which is the textbook on that. That's the hardest. Then she'd also have a visual text, and that makes sense. So it's something you can look at and then she'd have an easier one. So, like, you can actually find decodables that have informational texts. So like, just write reader has these cool little decodables with pre, you know. And so you can, you could do. You could add that in. And then there's a fourth kind that I can't remember, but so you can bring together groups of text. You can do a read aloud. So that's a technique, text sets.
And then you know, I mean, you can provide words to kids if they need those.
You know, I'm not as jazzed about that, but the research says that, so I can't. I mean, I can't say, you know, it did work as long as it wasn't more than 20% of the words. Right. There were studies that did that. So those are things you can do when there's a window, that it's not so hard that they can't do anything. You can kind of help support it.
[00:36:32] Kate Winn: Great.
[00:36:33] Kate Winn: Before I ask the next question, I just want to be clear, because sometimes there are misunderstandings when we go into what I'm going to talk about next. So we definitely want to use ideas like all of the ones that you just shared to help make sure that kids are accessing grade level, you know, the way we're calling grade level, those grade level complex texts. However, moving to the next question, we also want kids to be able to practice reading in text that they can more easily access at their own level and when they can't independently read at what we're calling grade level. And so what are some ways teachers can differentiate the text that kids can read to ensure that they have that time and text practicing, which is also so important.
[00:37:12] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Right. And that's really the heart of this article. This is why I wrote this article, because what I was seeing is, you know, it's kind of just exactly what we're seeing at the secondary level where kids can't read novels. So the teacher just reads it aloud or they read an excerpt. And that is, you know, we're going to have a whole generation of kids who are thinking like champs, but they can't spell, they can't read, they can't access it themselves. So one thing I just want to note before I go into kind of some of the techniques is it's just important to remember that. And I don't say this in the article, and I don't know the research on this, but the act of listening to someone else read and the act of reading yourself are two different activities.
So when you're listening, you can't independently reread or revisit. You're dependent on somebody else doing that. So your metacognition is really limited because someone else is directing the process. And I don't know, but I would venture that what is retained from listening versus what is retained from reading and rereading is not as high. I don't know that you're going to learn as much, but I don't know about the research. So in terms of techniques that you can use, the first thing, this is so obvious, but you have to make sure that you set aside time for kids to do it.
But that is often the problem, right? And so you have to find a time, and I'm not talking about drop everything and read. I did that practice. It was such a disaster.
I mean, I was told to do that, right? And I was supposed to model reading my little novel, and I did that. And there was this little kid, and I remember his name, and there he is every day reading Green Eggs and Ham. And I just intuitive was like, this doesn't make any sense. But I was a new teacher. I didn't have a highly developed library. And then when he went to the library, it was just like kind of, you get to choose your own book. And so he didn't have anything he could read. So this is not that the find a time is a dedicated time where kids are doing their own reading, where you're checking in with them. There's some level of accountability, you know, that they're getting something out of it, and, and it's real reading, and it's kind of accountable reading, if you will.
And that can be if you want, like if you're using quad set text, you can pull aside a group that's reading kind of a lower level, quads a lower level text that's going to complement the larger theme in the classroom. And what they've learned about Jupiter, for example, is going to make it easier to represent, you know, to read the word Jupiter. The next part is one that I think is really, really fraught. And I know Matt Burns talks a whole lot about this, and I'll mention one of his studies, too. But you can do what I call a best guess first match, right? So, I mean, I think people have legitimately identified problems with readability formulas. They're nothing. People get really trusting of those 1.2, 2.3, they think, wow, that's really precise. So, you know, the error of measurement is large, but you need some kind of ballpark, right? You need something to start with. So if you can get a reading level and a text level in the same metric. So if you get a Lexile level in the kids reading level and you look at the Lexile levels on the books, they're more likely to match. Now, Matt Burns has a new article that I like. It's a meta analysis of, basically fluency. If you're going for fluency, and he basically says that about 90, more than 95% accuracy is the sweet spot. He reaffirms that instructional level for accuracy. So you could sit and read with a kid, and it's like, if they're not hitting around 90%, 95% is probably not something they're going to be able to read accurately. The other thing is, I pointed out, you can help choose text for them. And there are some nice texts that are decodable for that stage. Low readability, high interest, and people, again, hate those. But that doesn't have to be that kid's only access to text. It can just be this 20 minutes that they do that.
And there's a nice text sets that go along with phonics for reading, which is Anita Archer's program.
Full disclosure, I do work for Curriculum Associates, so I want you to know that. And I don't have anything to do with phonics for reading. I just think it's an amazing program for closing the gap for decoders. And they have some nice text where one side of it is text that the teacher reads on the topic, which advances some of that really high-level information, and then the other side, the child reads, and it's a lot of text that the child reads. So it's not like the teacher reads all this stuff, and then the teacher says, Jupiter has rings. And then teacher reads, you know, it's like there's real reading. So I liked that.
So those are things you can do when the kids don't access the text. But the biggest thing is just do it.
Don't let them just listen all the time. That is so defeating.
[00:42:49] Kate Winn: It's funny you talk about your little student with your drop everything and read, because I can remember our SSR and the one that would just pull out the Guinness Book of World Records and look at the pictures till the time was up. Right. We all have those kids where I don't think they got a whole lot out of that period.
I appreciate that information. We want to find ways to help them access the grade-level material. We want them practicing at the material that's best at their level in terms of practice. And you write that in some cases, teachers are doing a great job bridging the text access gap that we've talked about. But you say, quote, a kind of amnesia kicks in, and sometimes everyone forgets that only half of the reading equation was taking place. Students were not recognizing words. So when that accessibility is kind of being provided for them. So this is not an either or. So we can still do that, but it's a both. And so what are some ways we can also close those gaps in terms of word recognition for the older below grade readers.
[00:43:49] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: And this is based on my reading, my review of Anita Archer's program, but also my reading of some of the studies that I mentioned. I think it's not like the same phonics instruction you're going to do in first grade. And believe me, I've tried that with middle schoolers. I had a doctoral student who's wonderful, and we did that, and it was such an epic fail, it was embarrassing for me, and I like. But I think what happens is that phonics instruction will have both that basic short word do you know the vowel patterns? Can you blend the words together? And some simple phonemic awareness, but it will also have a morphological content as well, so they're teaching both of those things together. Struggling intermediate readers benefit from both phonics foundations and appropriate multimorphemic instruction. So I don't think you like hold off now. I mean, okay, there may be really extreme cases where kids can't blend a word together or don't know, but mostly you're doing those two things in parallel. You're doing the foundational single word phonics, and then right away you're doing some multimorphemic phonics stuff.
And also using like techniques like vowel flexing, which is where you try one vowel sound and then another if the pattern is one that has multiple pronunciations. So, like, you come to the word steak, you can have three different sounds. Try one, then try another. Toto, that's been another play. Long e, long a. Yes. And interestingly, there's a real good research study. I think it's by Chen and Savage, and it included this vowel flexing. It also included decodable text, and I think it was with advanced readers. So closing decoding gaps is it's kind of a combination of those foundational and, and big words content at the same time. At least that's what the studies that I've seen do with those kids to intervene.
[00:46:01] Kate Winn: Thank you. I asked about complex text earlier, and I have to say you've been keeping me busy with reading material lately. You also wrote Teaching Skills for Complex Text: Deepening Close Reading in the Classroom. You wrote that a little while back, but I think it was a Christmas gift for me this year, and it's excellent. In my experience, teachers are getting the message about some of those pieces to help comprehension, like vocabulary instruction and background knowledge and things like that that can support. But there are other aspects of texts that can be challenging to kids that you discuss in this book. There are two that I noted in particular that I don't think all teachers could define and I think are really helpful to talk about Anaphora. Am I saying that right?
[00:46:44] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah.
[00:46:45] Kate Winn: And connectives are two that I noted in particular. Could you tell us what those are and how we might help kids tackle them to help with their comprehension of complex texts?
[00:46:56] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah. And so let me just kind of back up really quickly and say, I think the missing piece is sentence-level comprehension.
We have been assuming that kids can comprehend sentences, that they can get the main idea of a sentence, and actually, a lot of times they can't, and especially if they're multilingual learners. So anaphora and cataphora, which is a different. But anaphora is when one word, either a pronoun or another word, is used to replace a word that came before. So here's a basic example. Joyce went to the store. She wanted a snack. She replaces Joyce. Right.
Okay. That's called anaphora, and we usually see it with pronouns. And for native speakers, the pronouns, they know them. You don't even really have to teach them. You can just say, hey, what does she refer to? Multilingual learners don't know that. So you actually do have to teach them.
Cataphora is the opposite. So you have a word that is used ahead of the referent. So, for example, there's this book that I read about apple cider in the 1900s. It's called At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier. I'll just read a little excerpt. So one of the things I really say to teachers, and I love these professional audiences, but you have to be reading yourself, because when you read yourself. So I read this book, and the first sentence of this book was, “They were fighting over apples again. He wanted to grow more eaters to eat. She wanted spitters to drink. It was an argument rehearsed so often that by now, they both played their parts perfectly, their words flowing smooth and monotonous around each other.” Right off, that's cataphora. I don't know who they is. I don't know who he is. I don't know who she is. Right. By the way, this is an amazing and intriguing book about apples, which were primarily used in alcoholic cider because it's a safety drinking. And in this is interwoven John Chapman, who was Johnny Appleseed, and it's an amazing book, has cataphora. So that point is. That's what that is. These replacements that good authors make.
Anaphora, students have to infer that Joyce and she are the same thing. And this is how you keep. Maintain a thread of comprehension. You have to make. You have to pay attention. So that's what anaphora is. It can happen with verbs. John chased after the lost puppy. Caleb did too. Did too. Did what? Chased after the lost puppy. You can even replace whole clauses. Donna and Mark stopped at the grocery store closest to the store. Tommy stopped there. There.
The store closest. Right. So that's what. That's what anaphora is. And you do have to teach it the pronoun it - very difficult for kids because sometimes it has an antecedent and other times it doesn't. It's raining outside.
What does it refer to? Nothing. Right.
So we do have to teach kids how those relationships work, and there's lots of cool things. And then sometimes people do these replacements where they're not pronouns. Right. And the kids have to track those. So here's a, here's an example. This is from Eliza's Cherry Trees, which is a really lovely book about Japan's gift to America, the cherry trees. “Japanese people loved the cherry trees as their national symbol. Crowds gathered for picnics under the trees. People wrote poems and painted pictures to honor those sakura.”
Well, you have to track that “those sakura” represents or is referring to trees. Cherry trees. Right.
It's a subtle replacement. The author doesn't ever say to you, another name for cherry trees is Sakura. Sakura. I don't know how to say it. So it's very important that kids know these techniques and we teach them and we can teach them how to make their own writing. Interesting.
Connectives are, again, helpful to understanding individual sentences or adjacent sentences.
Connectives are conjunctions or other words that, I call them power charged words that basically convey a relationship between two parts of a sentence. It could be two full sentences. It could be clauses or phrases. So the obvious ones are like, and - David was going to the store and Cindy was going to the store. Then there's causal ones that tell us that one thing caused another because.
So consequently, therefore, the cool thing about this is kids know because you can teach them these others by just saying. It's just like because. David was unhappy because he didn't get a lollipop. The only thing is sometimes you'd have to reverse the cause and effect. Right. David didn't get a lollipop. Consequently, he was unhappy. David didn't get a lollipop, so he was unhappy. But they're the same. Then there are ones that kind of convey this oppositional thing so that you say something and then you put this power connective, and then something kind of opposite of what you expected is there. So, you know, I did, you know, she did not like baseball, but she went anyway, right? You would think if she didn't like baseball, she wouldn't go. And then there are conditional ones. If, then if you pick up your clothes, then you can go out and play. So you have to understand that. And then there's temporal ones before 1st, second, and last.
And these are really important for, again, understanding the parts of sentences and understanding how one thing connects to another.
The easier ones are the additional ones or the ones like, or nor the choices. The harder ones are, like, oppositional and conditional. But again, you have to teach these in text and mostly in authentic text that the kids are going to see.
[00:53:15] Kate Winn: I appreciate how you just added that last part in, in text and in authentic text because I noted, you know, a couple of the examples you used, you pulled from authentic text as you were making your point there. And I remember when reading your book, I can remember I was sitting by the fire in my basement and going through it, and then I remember thinking, oh, I'm gonna try. I'm gonna go on AI, on chat GPT and try to create some text. And so I made some just based on, you know, content areas that students in our schools would be covering at certain, in certain grades. So I would say, you know, for example, write a 250 word passage about medieval times at a fourth-grade level that includes six anaphora or something like that. Or I would say which examples I wanted, or I want, you know, five connectives in, you know, nonfiction piece about plants at third-grade level, including, and I would name some of them. And so it would spit something out. And as always, as always, you have to, you know, look for accuracy, make sure that it's what you want. But if your option is, you know, worksheets or something like a text, that that's not the most authentic text, certainly when you're creating it with AI. But, you know, if you're in between worksheets and real authentic text, I thought that was kind of a little bit of a way to bridge that gap.
[00:54:29] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: Yeah, and that's a great. That's exactly. Yeah, that's a great thing. And honestly, if you want to teach this stuff, one of the easiest ways to do it is to each day just ten minutes of your comprehension instruction, like, pull some sentences out of stuff that the kids are reading, or use an AI-generated text and just teach it. It doesn't require a ton of stuff and ask the kids to summarize sentences to each other. That'll give you a feel for if they're getting it.
[00:54:59] Kate Winn: This has been such a fascinating conversation. I think listeners are really going to appreciate, you know, talking about these kids that are a little bit older and all of these things we can do to assist with their reading. Is there anything that we have missed during this chat? Anything you'd like to add before we say goodbye?
[00:55:15] Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer: No, I'm just very excited about Big Words for Young Readers, and it does have a scope and sequence in there that goes k five. And it has lots of word lists, so like, you know, words with various prefixes and derivational suffixes. It has a chapter on morphology that is really skinny and easy to read. I say you can read that book on the beach, and I loved that because that's really the goal, is for it to be simple. It's not, it's not comprehension. And then I have another book coming up with a co-author next 2025. It's called There's Research for That.
And that is going to take 20 common questions. And I gave you a little sneak preview of one of those and kind of identify how does the research answer that? And so the one that I shared with you was mouth moves and the pictures. And what does the research say about teaching those mouth moves and the pictures and how to use them? So I'm excited about that and I'm tremendously honored to be asked to be a part of this podcast. Thank you.
[00:56:21] Kate Winn: Wonderful.
[00:56:21] Kate Winn: Well, I will continue reading everything that you write and sharing it with my audience. And thank you so much Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer for being here with us today on Reading Road Trip.
[00:56:33] Kate Winn: Show notes for this episode with all the links and information you need can be found at podcast.idaontario.com and you have been listening to season three, episode six with Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer. And now it's time for that typical end-of-the-podcast call to action. If you enjoyed this episode of Reading Road Trip, we'd love it if you could rate and or review it in your podcast app as this is extremely helpful for a podcast and your review might make it onto an episode. Of course, we welcome any social media love you feel inspired to spread as well. Feel free to tag IDA Ontario and me.
[00:57:09] Kate Winn: My handle is thismomloves on Twitter and Facebook and katethismomloves on Instagram. Make sure you're following the Reading Road Trip podcast in your app and watch for new episodes continuing every Monday throughout the summer.
[00:57:22] Kate Winn: We couldn't bring Reading Road Trip to you without behind the scenes support from Katelyn Hanna, Brittany Haynes and Melinda Jones at IDA Ontario. I'm Kate Wynn and along with my co producer, Dr. Una Malcolm. We hope this episode of Reading Road Trip has made your path to evidence based literacy instruction just a little bit clearer and a lot more fun. Join us next time when we bring another fabulous guest along for the ride on Reading Road Trip.
