Melissa & Lori Love Literacy ® Helping Students Read Multisyllabic Words with Devin Kearns
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Jun 6, 2025 This week features Devin Kearns, a literacy researcher and professor at NC State, who specializes in early reading and the brain's reading processes. He discusses the challenges students face when decoding multisyllabic words, especially around third grade. Kearns emphasizes the importance of flexible decoding strategies and the schwa sound. He shares practical, research-backed methods like syllable division and the 'peeling off' technique to enhance student comprehension and pronunciation, debunking traditional methods in favor of evidence-based approaches.
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Why Students Hit The Multisyllabic Wall
- Multisyllabic words introduce schwa sounds and variable vowel pronunciations that make decoding harder.
- After first grade most new words are multisyllabic, increasing decoding difficulty rapidly.
Mental Dictionary Guides Decoding
- Readers scan their mental lexicon to match pronunciations to known words while decoding.
- Phonological awareness helps transform imperfect pronunciations into recognitions of known words.
Syllable Division Is Unreliable
- Syllable-division VCV rules are inconsistent: they work about half the time in two-syllable words and worse in longer words.
- VCCV divisions are more reliable, but overall syllable rules carry high cognitive load.