Steacy and Compton
to the classroom: Episode 19
September 25, 2023
Today’s guests are Drs. Laura Steacy and Don Compton, researchers who explore and write about the skill Set for Variability. You’ll hear them talk about this new area of research which offers an explanation for how students self-correct pronunciations of words when reading, and may have interesting implications for how we learn to remember spellings of irregular words. After my interview, I’m joined by my colleagues Macie Kerbs and Lainie Powell for a discussion about takeaways for the classroom.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I am so glad to welcome Dr. Steacy and Dr. Compton today for a conversation about Set for Variability, which is a research interest of theirs. I would love to begin with a definition because I think that some of my listening audience maybe hasn't heard of this skill before. What is it: Set for Variability?
Laura Steacy:
So we think of set for variability as a child's ability to disambiguate the mismatch between the decoded form of a word and it's correct pronunciation.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Can you give an example?
Laura Steacy:
Yes. So actually I can share the prompt that children hear when they do this oral language assessment, if that's helpful. So they'll hear the prompt, "Today we're going to play a word game with Alice. In this game, Alice tries to say a word, but she says it the wrong way. You have to figure out what Alice is trying to say." And then some examples that they might hear would be MUS-KLES for muscles or RI-VER for river.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So is this only something where the reader would need to employ it when the word they read is not actually a word? Or are there other places where they would need to employ this skill? Like CONtent or conTENT where you emphasize a different part of the word and it has a completely different meaning.
Don Compton:
So that's a different instance for us. We think that context cleans that up. We're really talking about when a child comes to a new word and tries to decode the word but doesn't come up with an actual word that it doesn't immediately click. And so yeah, CONtent versus conTEN -- that could happen, but context will clean that up. We're talking about a child cleaning up the decoding act so that it matches a word in their vocabulary and then applying that to the text to make sure that that's the right word. So it's really for almost, we think that as kids are learning to read, if you believe in the Self-teaching Hypothesis by Share, whenever they get to a new letter string, they're going to sound it out. And many times it's not going to be exact. And so this cleanup process is a really important piece that gets them to be able to go from a pretty faithful decoding trial on their own to the actual word.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I like that you said that "word cleanup process." That kind of makes sense to me. So I have a first attempt, it's not a vocabulary word I know. I'm going to try to clean it up and fix it up and say it to match something I know. So I'm thinking words that are maybe irregularly spelled the words "have" and "said," especially for beginning readers would be particularly important.
Laura Steacy:
Yeah. This has certainly been explored a lot in irregular word reading. It's also been found to be a significant predictor of reading in more consistent orthographies, so for regular word reading as well. So it's related to both, but it seems to be that it would be particularly important for a irregular word reading.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Do you see the need to use these different strategies mostly with beginning readers or once kids start approaching multi-syllabic words? Or is it kind of across all reading development until kids become really accurate and automatic with their word reading?
Don Compton:
That's a pretty awesome question. We think of it right now as whenever you're encountering a fairly new word. A word you haven't seen. So this could be a skill that is important from very early on to when you start getting into content and academic type of words in school. We also are becoming more and more, I don't think the right word is convinced, but we we're thinking that people tend to save these decoded forms and that they help with things like spelling. So a lot of adults say "wed-nes-day" to spell Wednesday. So that's not something they probably did as a first grader. They must be doing this over time. And so our research right now, particularly Laura's, is trying to look at whether people are actually saving these pronunciations as part of the word and can then draw on them later. It would be fascinating if that's the case. And so what that would mean is during all of new word learning from a decoding standpoint, we're saving those things and we're using those things. And good spellers probably save them more accurately than poor spellers or good decoders may save better representations than others. Now, do we know that that's for sure the case? Not yet, but Laura's got a longitudinal study that's looking at this in young kids to see whether that's the case, so I guess the word is to stay tuned and see what she finds because it's be pretty important, I think.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I was telling her when she logged on, I said, I asked her how to pronounce her last name, and I said, I've been saying "Ste-a-cy" to spell it. So there's a perfect example of holding onto that spelling, probably.
Don Compton:
Yeah, I mean, I think we do it. I think we do it, and so what that means is there may be a real link here between decoding skills and then later spelling skills too, in terms of if you're a good decoder, if you save these representations, they may show up when you're starting to learn how to or need to spell these words. So I'm pretty sure you're going to spell "Steacy" right if you kept "Ste-a-cy" in your mind. And I, I'll bet that sticks with you for a while.
So another way to think about this potential skill is that it takes away from the need to learn a lot of spelling rules in that if you can get close and if you can store this decoded form at that word level, you've got what you need to spell it correctly. You don't have to think about, oh, what's the rule for that where there's an I and a E and a C, and sometimes that doesn't work for certain rules. We think that this alleviates that. The problem is it's dependent on good decoding skills, which we think are critical for word reading, but it seems like that that's going to be critical for storing something that may be helpful spelling as well.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah. You've mentioned David Share's Self-Teaching Hypothesis before, and I'd love to explore a little bit more about how this Set for Variability relates to the Self-Teaching Hypothesis.
Don Compton:
Okay. So we think of orthographic learning, the orthographic learning hypothesis by Castles and Nation and the Self-Teaching Hypothesis by Share to be good buds. They are sort of this idea that learning to read words is an item-specific challenge. And when a child comes to a new word, their task is to try to make a link between the spelling pattern, the phonological representation, and the meaning of the word. And self-teaching would say that a lot of times kids have to do this on their own in texts. We're not there to support them every time they see a new word and that they need to go through this process, this process of trying to decode the word and then trying to match whether that what they come up with meets a word in their head and meets what context is saying that that word should be.
And so there's a process of going from trying to translate what the letters say to what the word is and whether it's in context. And then we think of Set for V, or actually many think of Set for V, it was first talked about by Carson and Elbow as the bridge between this decoded form a child comes up with and the actual pronunciation of the word.
Laura Steacy:
So if you get close to the correct word, having the word in your vocabulary is important, right? To be able to identify the actual word in terms of this interaction between kind of children and print. So what the word brings and what the child brings to the task. So when a child is confronted with an unfamiliar letter string, they can engage in what's called either full decoding or partial decoding. So full decoding happens when the word is consistent and regular. And a child has sufficient decoding skills and phonics skills to read the word, whereas partial decoding happens either when a child doesn't know all of the phonics rules to read a particular word, or the word is irregular and would never be decodable by faithfully applying typical phonics rules. And so Set for Variability comes in when a child partially decodes a word and then has to kind of bridge to the actual pronunciation.
Don Compton:
So think of the example of "pint." So going from "pint" to "pint" doesn't seem that difficult. Think about the word suede. Going from whatever your decoded form of suede is to--
Jennifer Serravallo:
S-U-E-D-E
Don Compton:
Yeah, yeah. Takes a lot more and probably puts a lot more demands on the language system to try to clean that up. And so there's real differences between across kids in terms of decoding skill, how well they can do this to get as close as they can. And some words facilitate this better than others.
Don Compton:
And then in the end, do they know the word suede and does it fit into the context they're trying to read? All of that plays a part. And Tumner and Chapman have a really good study with young kids to show that the vocabulary to word reading connection is mediated by your ability to do set for variability. The better you are at it, the more it explains that relationship between the actual, your vocabulary and your decoding skills or word reading skills on this. So it's a pretty cool, pretty important and relationship.
Jennifer Serravallo:
This is very cool. And so Dr. Steacy, going back to the assessment example you gave before you gave, did you just read the-- I can't remember. Did you just read the word by itself or did you read the word in a sentence?
Laura Steacy:
Yeah, so we do the task in isolation. So they just hear the word and then they give us the pronunciation. So Tumner and Chapman have done it both in isolation and within the context of a sentence. And the relationship with word reading is a little higher when it's done in isolation,
Jennifer Serravallo:
The relationship with word reading. So
Laura Steacy:
the correlation,
Jennifer Serravallo:
how well it's able to predict how well you'd be able to do it otherwise, right? Yeah, that makes sense.
Don Compton:
If you put it into context, you allow other important general language skills to help with the cleanup. And so it doesn't isolate the skill as well, because all sorts of other skills come into it. And it turns out that psychometrically for us doing it in isolation gives us the strongest predictive relationship because it really isolates this skill instead of allowing other skills to come into it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
That makes sense.
Don Compton:
What's probably the more realistic, more realistic when children are reading in text, having it done in text would matter, but we're trying to get the best prediction as possible.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Are there any other assessments that you're using? And I wonder too, teachers are listening to this, so they're probably wondering, is that an assessment I should go get? Should I assess for this in my classroom? Or are you really developing these measures for the purposes of research and it's really meant to stay there?
Laura Steacy:
That's a really good question, and I think there's still some work to be done in this area to kind of answer that question. And I think that question is directly related to instruction and whether this is something that should be focused on in instruction as well.
Don Compton:
We're not ready to jump in and just say, you should be assessing this, you should be training this. We do not expect the general set for V training would transfer to reading and spelling skills in children without linking the set for V training directly to the items that kids are learning to read or spell. So what we don't want to see right now is spending 10 minutes doing the set for V task in a oral situation and then say, okay, now we're going to read some words. What we'd like to do is say, let's try to decode, or let's try to spell these words, let's try to sound them out as we do it. Oh, that doesn't match. Let's keep that in mind as we try to spell this. And we're trying to collect data to try to decide whether we are at the right spot or not. Our job is to prove ourselves wrong. So that's where we're trying to prove ourselves wrong right now.
Laura Steacy:
So there's a little bit of a need to kind of disentangle this oral language task that we've used in our research because it's not testing a child's flexibility in actual word reading, it's testing this oral language piece and their ability to go from hearing the decoded form to providing the correct pronunciation of the word.
Don Compton:
There are programs that actually try to train flexibility in the oral word reading task. So Maureen Lovett has a program called Empower where they concentrate on the irregularities of vowels and ask kids to try to read the word using their knowledge of various vowel pronunciations and to clean that up, incorporating it into a word reading task in a way that to us makes a lot of sense.
Laura Steacy:
And that's really important because when you actually look at the 5,000 most frequent words in English, over 50% of the words contain some kind of variable vowel including schwas or reduced vowels.
Jennifer Serravallo:
50%, wow.
Laura Steacy:
So this skill to be flexible with that seems really important. And I think particularly important as children get into more complex words and multi-syllabic words where there are more and more of these kinds of irregularities introduced because of syllable breaks and other things.
Don Compton:
And I think this along with training kids to have multiple appropriate pronunciations, there still needs to be flexibility. So the schwa is a great example in that they're, they're just going to have to kind of fill in what that pronunciation should be for that shwa. But particularly as long words get longer, it's really hard to isolate just certain areas of words to say, I'm going to be flexible just in that piece and hopefully I'm right with this piece. So I think it's it's knowledge of these various sounds to get close and then this flexibility to clean it up.
Jennifer Serravallo:
So the flexible vowel strategy, we're talking about it in isolation, but I imagine might also be a helpful prompt to give readers when they're reading connected texts, they get to a word that you see that look in their eyes. Like, "What? That's not something I recognize." You could say, try a different vow sound, right, try a different one. What else? Do you know what other sounds could that vowel represent? What other strategies or prompts could you see teachers teaching kids or prompts that they could give to kids when they're reading connected texts to help them employ set for V?
Don Compton:
Oh, now you're going outside what we know from research.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Oh shoot, am I? I have this tendency, I always want to apply it. You're like, "Well, stop right there. That's all. That's as far as we could go.
Don Compton:
It might be worth talking about where's the term “Set for V” comes from. And so Set for V was first coined back in 1975 by Eleanor Gibson and her colleague, I don't know his first name. Levine Levin. Levin Gibson and Levin 1975.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Look at you trying different pronunciations.
Don Compton:
Yeah, there you go. So yeah, Gibson and Levin in 1975 came up first mentioned sort of in English, kids need a set for variability. And then this was later resurrected by Richard Venesky in 1999. And so the way that Venesky talks about it is English is more regular and we can't just throw it out and say, because of its irregularity, we shouldn't teach decoding. What he said is we should teach decoding but also support a set for variability. That's as far as he went. So this is what we are trying to do is sort of get at this child-by-word interaction. And then I think through that will come some hypotheses about how to employ this when kids are actually reading in text. But we want the kids to start by doing their very best to come as close to that word as possible. From there, we have a teachable moment to say, What are some other pronunciations? That word sort of sounds like this. Does the context work with that? That's where the rest of those cueing systems come in. After you have a decoded form to clean up. So I think we've got a long ways to go to think what sort of the pedagogical ramifications of this are, but I think we'll have good information in the next few years about what we we're hoping to do from a teaching standpoint when kids get into text and maybe a set of variable prompts for the variable vowels.
We don't want to take results from research and mistranslate them in a way that isn't helpful for kids when they're in text. Right? And so that's why we have to be really careful about thinking about these things.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I'm just thinking in the same way that you can kind of give kids a tip when you get to a word, if you try a pronunciation and it doesn't sound like a word you know, chances are it's the vowel. Try different vowel sounds. Keep trying all the different sounds that vowel can represent, including a schwa, once they know that. That's a strategy that they could use that helps them to use this particular skill. Another one might be, if the word has more than one syllable, try to stress (in the CONtent conTENT example), try to stress different parts of the word. Like you said, the context might be enough there to help them figure that out.
Don Compton:
Right? But I want to say this whole process works in a child where the decoding skills are evolving over time. And so it's really important for teachers not to think, oh, Set for V's going to solve all my problems for these poor decoders. No, it's going to be helpful for all decoders, but we need these decoding skills to continue to evolve.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely. I think it's so important. Whenever I talk about strategies for word level reading, people say no, all they need is phonics. They just need to read through the word left to right decoding. That's it. And it's not it because we've got, like you said, 50% of the most frequent words are not just straight up decodable like that.
Don Compton:
So we've got a little quote from, let's see, who was it? Goswami and Ziegler. So "to decode the most frequent 3000 monosyllabic English words, a child needs to know mappings between approximately 600 different orthographic patterns and 400 phonological rimes. Far more than would be needed if a child could simply learn to map the 26 letters onto the 26 phonemes." That's the essence of, it's not, that's the essence all about teaching individual letter sounds.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Yeah, so it's so many things in reading instruction, it's a "both/and" not an "either/or." It's a both/and. Yeah, that message is super clear.
Don Compton:
I like that: "both/and"
Laura Steacy:
I think even beyond decoding skills, you mentioned the importance of vocabulary. So it's certainly not that we're saying that this is the only piece that matters, that this phonics and this flexibility at the word level is the only thing that matters. Of course. It's like one piece of the bigger picture vocabulary is important. Other things related to comprehension of course are also sort of important pieces and they all kind of work together.
Don Compton:
And yes, so we're advocating for early language instruction that supports these processes, and so it's not a sequential piece. We got to get the oral language going early, pre-print exposure as much as we can. If you don't know the word "suede," you'll never get there based on the spelling. You have to have that word in your head to clean it up when you get to it.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. All right. I'm going to ask you another question. This might be outside of the scope of the research, so you can tell me this goes too far. But I'm thinking about texts that teachers are using with students, and if we want kids to be able to practice being flexible in their word solving beyond just applying the specific letter sound correspondence that they learned in phonics, that says to me that we can't be too controlled with the texts that kids are reading. That while there may be a place for decodable texts, for example, that really closely match what kids have learned in phonics, if we don't also give them opportunities to read texts that have more variability, how can they then try to be flexible and apply this. Would you agree with that or do you want to say anything back to that idea?
Laura Steacy:
Yeah, I think you're exactly right that it's important for children to be exposed to all kinds of different texts, and some of that is through reading, and some of that is through listening so that they're exposed to all kinds of different words and that they're exposed to typical kind of texts.
Don Compton:
Yeah, so I don't think we're opposed to using decodable texts in certain situations to help kids practice the phonics lessons, but if you really think about what self-teaching is saying is that and orthographic learning, these are opportunities when kids are reading on their own. That they're applying skills reading a text, and they're learning while they're reading. And I think that that comes through natural text where they're encountering words that are appropriate for them to try to figure out that have meaning within that text that can be confirmed, that would be words that in a reasonable way are probably in their vocabulary. That all seems, and plus it's probably a lot more fun for the kids to read. That that supports the idea of giving kids a set of skills and letting them work through text in a way that is meaningful for them and allows them to practice these new strategies or knowledge bases that they've learned.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I think that's a great place to stop for today. I'm so very grateful that the two of you spent some time with me today so I could learn some more about this. And I am really curious to see where this research goes, especially the spelling research too. So thank you for sharing all that now and I look forward to keeping up with it as time unfolds.
Don Compton:
Thanks for having us. This was awesome. Yeah, it was fun.
Laura Steacy:
Thanks for inviting us. Bye.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Take care.
Jennifer Serravallo:
I now welcome my colleagues, Macie Kerbs and Lainie Powell for a conversation about what we can bring to the classroom. This one's a little unique, right? Because they're saying we can't really do these things to the classroom just yet, but I think there's some knowledge that we learned that can help inform some things or help us notice some things or maybe there's some things we can start trying. I don't know. What did you both think?
Lainie Powell:
I thought it was fascinating. And too, what was really affirming for this time we're living in right now of helping teachers with the growing science around reading development, early reading development is that it's so on fire right now and unsettled. The fact that they were so hesitant to make links to classroom application was just like, wow, this is really kind of an emerging body of knowledge.
One thing I did take away from it is I started to wonder, and I would love to hear you guys weigh in on this. As we talked about this idea, I listened to them talk about this difference between, what do they call it, partial decoding and the full decoding. Decoding skills are only going to get you so far.
And I wondered when listening to them, if we want to get to full decoding, if we need to spend more time with tasks, encouraging readers to be strategic, thinking about balancing the text diet that we put in kids' hands and bolstering vocabulary.
Macie Kerbs:
They kind of alluded to the way research has been interpreted in the classroom where even how he was saying, it's not like we're advocating for a 10 minute chunk of time doing this work, and I appreciated that because so often that's what happens is now take this other 10 minutes of your day and do this other thing, and all these pieces become siloed, but we don't focus on the orchestration of skills. So it's starting to suck out of independent reading time where kids are never able to try some of these strategies and be flexible in authentic text. So I just appreciated that they had that vision already going into it, even though they couldn't really speak to what it would look like. It was almost like a cautionary tale for "don't think that this is one more thing to dedicate in your literacy time."
Lainie Powell:
Right.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I'm grateful that they distinguished between the task that they've developed for research purposes, which is an oral/auditory task, and whether or not it should actually happen in the classroom. They were very clear that this is something we're trying in research to see if we can figure out which kids have this skill or use this skill or not. Not so that teachers can go and practice this. Yeah, I don't know. I think we see this a lot, right? This measure that's used in research or this finding in research, but if the application to the classroom has not been tested, I think that's just a really important caution against rushing to include it.
Macie Kerbs:
I did also like that they talked about just this idea of integration and reciprocity between oral language and really pre-print work with reading and decoding, and they really only said word reading skills. And I think that's an important distinguishing feature of we're not talking about comprehension also at the same time. We're looking at that word level and then the encoding ability of those words and how those three really work together to make a skilled reader of words and being able to encode messages that also have those features present. I just really appreciated that nod to, I could see this happening in shared reading and I could see this happening in interactive writing all of the context across our literacy block, not just in reading, not just in phonics, not just in writing, but how do we marry all of these things together.
Lainie Powell:
From an instructional standpoint? When are you doing it? That's so interesting. Macy, I was also in that same vein thinking about, I appreciate how Dr. Compton ended with naming how the Self-teaching Hypothesis and the Orthographic Learning Theory. I think he said, and y'all correct me if I'm wrong, would best make a case for authentic texts. And so it got me thinking a little bit about the instruction that you talked about, but also when is the "try it" for the kids and as a helping teachers, there's not an exact science yet maybe, but helping teachers make decisions about when do we shift the balance between easily decoded texts versus more authentic texts so that they have more of this flexibility with words, with word level. He called it item specific reading.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I think thinking back to Freddie Hebert's episode, she was cautioning us against using just one kind of text as well that this idea of a balanced diet of a variety of different text types for different purposes. You've got the decodable text just to practice right now applying this one thing that you just learned into connected text. But probably a lot of the time they need to be an authentic texts, both for enjoyment and comprehension reasons, but also that they can practice being flexible.
Lainie Powell:
And when does that shift occur, though? I don't like, I'm thinking is it reader by reader? Is it second grade? When do you start to shift more to authentic texts in an independent reading diet versus controlled text?
Macie Kerbs:
Gosh, I'm even thinking about my own kindergartner who he loves decodables, actually my oldest didn't, but my middle does. He really loves decodeable text, especially that they've gotten so much more engaging. But recently we've gotten into Elephant and Piggy finally in that authentic text and it's above his level and it's hard. But he worked so hard at decoding some of those words and using the context to really figure out what those words are. Because he's so engaged and I think because his teacher did such a beautiful job of using those through interactive read alouds and other experiences across the day, the books became familiar. They're comforting to him. Enjoyable is just, yeah, Mo Willems is just the best anyways. But I don't think that it's about when it's about where across our days with our early readers, can we put in these opportunities so that when they get to that point where they're ready to put some of this decoding knowledge to work, they have access to texts that they know. I think withholding the text would do more harm than good in that situation.
Jennifer Serravallo:
And I also think Dr. Steacy's caution that we have to continue keeping up read alouds and knowledge building so that the vocabulary is there. Because if they don't have the word in their knowledge, then how can they possibly decode it correctly? And I was thinking in particular, I didn't ask them about this, but how about students who are learning English and they need additional support, of course with the vocabulary, and that's going to impede their decoding abilities, or it might show up as a decoding issue. But really it's, it's a vocabulary issue because they can't apply flexibility to arrive at a pronunciation for a word that they don't know. Right?
Macie Kerbs:
Yeah. I kind of wonder if how they said, how our decoding skills have to continue to evolve with students. In order for this to really work, we have to keep teaching some of these phonics patterns and decoding patterns. I feel like that's probably also true for vocabulary. We have to keep evolving our vocabulary instruction as the content changes, as the grade level demands change, and as we keep evolving our instruction, it will create more opportunities for students to be flexible as they approach new words.
Jennifer Serravallo:
Well, I think that's a good place to stop for today. Thank you so much, both of you, for joining me for this conversation. I hope you found it as fascinating as I did.
Lainie Powell:
Thank you, Jen.
Macie Kerbs:
Thanks, Jen.
Lainie Powell:
Good to see y'all. Bye.