Reading Longer Words: Insights Into Multisyllabic Word Reading

Abstract

Students with persistent reading difficulties are often especially challenged by multisyllabic words; they tend to have neither a systematic approach for reading these words nor the confidence to persevere (Archer, Gleason, & Vachon, 2003; Carlisle & Katz, 2006; Moats, 1998). This challenge is magnified by the fact that the vast majority of English words are multisyllabic and constitute an increasingly large proportion of the words in elementary school texts beginning as early as grade 3 (Hiebert, Martin, & Menon, 2005; Kerns et al., 2016). Multisyllabic words are more difficult to read simply because they are long, posing challenges for working memory capacity. In addition, syllable boundaries, word stress, vowel pronunciation ambiguities, less predictable grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and morphological complexity all contribute to long words' difficulty. Research suggests that explicit instruction in both syllabification and morphological knowledge improve poor readers' multisyllabic word reading accuracy; several examples of instructional programs involving one or both of these elements are provided.