On Eating Elephants and Teaching Syllabication

Tim Shanahan

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?

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