We must remember that the sounding out of words is only intended to provide readers with approximate – rather than exact – pronunciations anyway. Telling students that VCV patterns are to be divided after the first vowel may benefit the reading of words like label or tiger, but it plays hob with words such as statue. Teaching syllabication as a rigid set of “rules” makes no sense, since our orthography doesn’t work like that. Students need to develop a mental set for diversity or variability when it comes to word recognition. I take it that Kearns was just reminding us that simplistic approaches to decoding instruction that encourage students to expect a simple and consistent set of pronunciation rules would be a poor reflection of the facts of the English spelling system. None of these were the focus of his analysis. And, that still leaves us with all of the other kinds of syllables such as sion, tion, ble, or a raft of common morphological units that operate consistently as syllables in our language (e.g., un, pre, trans, pro, ing, ed).
He also reported that there were particular spellings with highly reliable pronunciations within that universe of words (such as “ic” and “wa”). He found a high degree of reliability in VCCV words (such as rab-bit) and a reasonable degree of consistency in VCV words of two syllables (though that division rule didn’t do so well with longer words). Remember Kearns only examined a single category of syllabication patterns (a group governing the pronunciation of single vowels). I don’t see it that way (a close reading of the study suggests Kearns doesn’t either – and his other work confirms that (Kearns & Whaley, 2019)). You seem to think it says something about whether to teach syllables. I, too, read the Kearns study (Kearns, 2020). In other words, syllables are pretty basic. The syllable has been found to be an essential unit in phonological processing (Ecalle & Magnan, 2007). The consistency of spelling patterns and their relationship to phonemes and pronunciations is determined, in part, by where particular letters appear in syllables rather than where they appear in words (Venezky, 1967), and the perception of vowel sounds (the central element of the syllable) is key to successful early phonemic awareness development (Linnea Ehri has described the perception of the syllable as paving “the way for entre into benefiting from phonics instruction”).
It isn’t always clear how to divide things and what do you with the vowels once you have bite size chunks? That’s the problem when it comes to splitting up English words. That may seems pretty sensible, but where do you bite? When you confront multi-syllable words, it may help to break them into smaller parts. That, fundamentally, is the idea of syllabication in decoding. The experts say if you want to do something hard break the problem into smaller parts. If you look at the productivity literature – how to solve complex problems or take on overwhelming challenges – the idea of “decomposition” comes up a lot. So, to reach my goal, I just had to ride 10 miles 10 times. You see, though I couldn’t ride a century, I could easily ride 10 miles. That realization made all the difference. It dawned on me that I would never be able to pedal 100 miles and that no one else could either. What turned things around? I had an epiphany. I pedaled all 500 miles and was even charging at the end. I was so discouraged I I wanted to drop out there is no shame in knowing your limitations.īut I didn’t quit. The practice was making my back ache and my knees hurt, but I felt no closer to being able to accomplish those distances. Three of the days’ rides would be centuries (100 miles plus). What are your thoughts on teaching syllable division patterns? I recently came across some new research from Devin Kearns and it made me start thinking about if all the time programs spend teaching syllable division patterns is really justified. If teaching syllable division is not time well invested, what type of instruction would you recommend replacing it with?