Welcome to this episode of TLP! My guest is Dr. Devin Kearns, who is an Associate Professor of Special Education in the department of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Kearns’s research focuses on reading disability, including dyslexia and school-aged children with an emphasis on linking educational practice to cognitive science.

In this episode we discuss helping students read long words. Our discussion includes polysyllabic and polymorphemic discussion, as well as tradeoffs between those two modes of instruction.

Here are the two long words we discuss at ~21:42

pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters, 12 syllables, 6 morphemes)

humuhumunukunukuapuaa (21 letters, 12 syllables, 1 morpheme; state fish of Hawaii)

Link to Dr. Kearn’s excellent teacher-friendly website: https://www.devinkearns.org/teachers

Link to Phinder (super cool!): https://www.devinkearns.org/phinder

Reference:

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