On Eating Elephants and Teaching Syllabication

Blast from the Past: This entry first appeared on March 13, 2021, and was republished on February 22, 2025. The reason for reissuing this now is because of recent exchanges I have observed on discussion boards. As far as I can tell, there is not much in the way of new research evidence on the teaching of syllabication – meaning that I have not changed my conclusions expressed in this blog. Nevertheless, I suspect that the newly energized interest in the role that morphology plays in different aspects of reading development (Colenbrander, et al., 2024) may increase interest in making certain that students recognize syllables.  When this blog was first issued it elicited 22 comments. There is a link to those at the bottom of this page.

Teacher Question: 

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? 

Shanahan response:

I was training for a 500-mile bike trip. Three of the days’ rides would be centuries (100 miles plus). Practicing for those efforts was making my back ache and my knees hurt, but I felt no closer to being able to accomplish those distances. They seemed impossible. I was so discouraged that I wanted to drop out. There is no shame in knowing your limitations.

But I didn’t quit. I pedaled all 500 miles and was even charging at the end.

What turned things around?

I had an epiphany. It dawned on me that I could never pedal 100 miles and that no one else could either. That realization made all the difference. You see, though I couldn’t ride a century, I could easily ride 10 miles. So, to reach my goal, I just had to ride 10 miles 10 times.

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. The experts say if you want to do something hard break the problem into smaller parts.

That, fundamentally, is the idea of syllabication in decoding. When you confront multi-syllable words, it may help to break them into smaller parts.

It’s kind of like that old joke:

How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time.

That may seem sensible, but where do you bite?

That’s the problem when it comes to dividing English words. It isn’t always clear how to divide things. And what do you with the vowels once you have bite size chunks?

Syllables matter in English. 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.

If you doubt this think of a word like tiger. If you break the word in two before the letter g, then you are most likely to come up with the proper pronunciation. If you divide it after the g, you end up with Tigger, which may make Winnie the Pooh happy, but doesn’t get you to the right word. Of course, you could teach kids to divide all such words before the consonant, but then you end up reading camel as came-el. Where you break such words into syllables determines whether the word follows the most widely used pronunciation patterns or is an exception.  

Linnea Ehri has described the perception of the syllable as paving “the way for entry into benefiting from phonics instruction”. The syllable has been found to be an essential unit in phonological processing (Ecalle & Magnan, 2007). In other words, syllables are basic.

I, too, read the Kearns study (Kearns, 2020). You seem to think it says something about whether to teach syllables. I don’t see it that way. A close reading suggests Kearns doesn’t either – and his other work confirms that (Kearns & Whaley, 2019). Remember Kearns only examined a single category of syllabication patterns (a group governing the pronunciation of single vowels). 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). He also reported that there were spellings within that universe with highly reliable pronunciations (such as “ic” and “wa”). That still leaves us with all 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). Kerns didn’t examine any of these.

Kearns seems to be 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 English spelling system.

Students need to develop a mental set for diversity or variability when it comes to word recognition. Teaching syllabication as a rigid set of “rules” makes no sense, since our orthography doesn’t work like that. 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.

We must remember that the sounding out of words is only intended to provide readers with approximate – rather than exact – pronunciations. It may be possible to determine that the word is statue if you starts with “stay-tue”, but it would be infinitely more likely if “stat” was the starting point.

The solution to that problem isn’t banning syllabication training, but to make it more conditional (investigations like the Kearns’ study can be useful for informing those curriculum choices). In any event, it is wise to tell budding readers that when beavering away at an unknown word with that VCV pattern, they should try splitting the word both before and after the consonant, trying out at least a couple of the high probability pronunciation possibilities (there are more choices than those two, with schwa being a frequent culprit – Rosemary Weber (2018) provides an interesting analysis of the role of the schwa in word perception). 

As I’ve written many times before, we can’t determine what works in teaching through descriptive studies of the brain or language. Such studies may help explain why some instructional approaches work or provide valuable insights about new pedagogical possibilities. But they can’t reveal what works – which is what any real science of reading instruction ultimately must be about.

There aren’t a huge number of instructional studies to go on, and some of those found that syllable teaching didn’t work. However, an insightful analysis (Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004) sorts this out nicely: Those regimes that taught rigid spelling rules for syllabication didn’t improve reading, while those that aimed at fostering conditionality and flexibility in the use of syllables to decode words did significantly better. Since that analysis, syllable instruction studies have been consistently positive in their results (Diliberto, Beattie, Flowers, & Algozzine, 2009; Doignon-Camus & Zagar, 2014; Ecalle, Kleinsz, & Magnan, 2013; Ecalle & Magnan, 2007; Gray, Ehri, & Locke, 2018).

Your letter makes it sound as if teachers spend a lot of time teaching syllabication. I doubt that and hope it isn’t the case. In studies that found syllabication instruction to improve word recognition and reading comprehension, students received only 2-9 hours of such teaching (even 2 hours of syllable training was reported to be beneficial).

Given this, I’d teach syllabication. It has value. The amount of such teaching should be limited. Decoding instruction is not primarily or mainly about teaching students to sound out words. Such teaching, if successful, must instigate readers to perceive patterns and conditionalities within words (that’s what orthographic mapping and statistical learning are all about).

Teach syllabication but expose kids to the exceptions and teach them to consider alternative possibilities and to use these divisions conditionally and flexibly. Approach words both through decoding and spelling (see Richard Gentry’s fine books on this). Focus considerable attention on the morphological units within words (for this I turn to the books like Words Their Way, and to Peter Bowers’ WordWorks Literacy Centre.)

Please pass the elephant.

References

Bhattacharya, A., & Ehri, L. C. (2004). Graphosyllabic analysis helps adolescent struggling readers read and spell words. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 37(4), 331-348. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1177/00222194040370040501

Colenbrander, D., von Hagen, A., Kohnen, S., Wegener, S., Ko, K., Beyersmann, E., . . . Castles, A. (2024). The effects of morphological instruction on literacy outcomes for children in english-speaking countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 36(4), 119. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-024-09953-3

Diliberto, J. A., Beattie, J. R., Flowers, C. P., & Algozzine, R. F. (2009). Effects of teaching syllable skills instruction on reading achievement in struggling middle school readers. Literacy Research and Instruction, 48(1), 14-27. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1080/19388070802226253

Doignon-Camus, N., & Zagar, D. (2014). The syllabic bridge: The first step in learning spelling-to-sound correspondences. Journal of Child Language, 41(5), 1147-1165. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1017/S0305000913000305

Ecalle, J., Kleinsz, N., & Magnan, A. (2013). Computer-assisted learning in young poor readers: The effect of grapho-syllabic training on the development of word reading and reading comprehension. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(4), 1368-1376. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1016/j.chb.2013.01.041

Ecalle, J., & Magnan, A. (2007). Development of phonological skills and learning to read in French. European Journal of Psychology of Education, 22(2), 153-167. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1007/BF03173519

Gray, S. H., Ehri, L. C., & Locke, J. L. (2018). Morpho-phonemic analysis boosts word reading for adult struggling readers. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 31(1), 75-98. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1007/s11145-017-9774-9

Kearns, D.M. (2020). Does English have useful syllable division patterns? Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145– S160. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.342

Kearns, D. M., & Whaley, V. M. (2019). Helping students with dyslexia read long words: Using syllables and morphemes. Teaching Exceptional Children, 51(3), 212–225. https://doi.org/10.1177/0040059918810010

Venezky, R. L. (1967). English orthography: Its graphical structure and its relation to sound. Reading Research Quarterly, 2(3), 75–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/747031

Weber, R. (2018). Listening for schwa in academic vocabulary. Reading Psychology, 39(5), 468-491. http://dx.doi.org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1080/02702711.2018.1464531

Earlier Comments

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