The Reading Wars and the Impact on Jewish Schools
February 20, 2026
Torah Leadership: Guiding a Group of Diverse Individuals
February 20, 2026
Rabbi Jordan Blitstein MS. Ed.
Much of the focus of kriah instruction is on the early years, as children learn to identify the letters and the sounds they represent. When young readers advance from decoding sounds to reading whole words and sentences, some struggle with the cognitive load of putting these sounds together fluently. One strategy for these readers is called chunking, where they are taught to break up words into smaller chunks. There are two ways to chunk a word. For Hebrew reading, we should consider the way that is less common, called morphological chunking. In this article, I will review the stages of learning to read and show why morphological chunking has advantages for young readers of Hebrew.
Stages of Reading Instruction
Teaching students to read can be divided into a few stages. In the first stage, the sounds of language are broken down into the smallest units of sound (phonemes, or for writing, graphemes), and symbols represent that sound. The first stage is to show the student that certain symbols (such as letters) correspond to sound. For example, the “A” makes the first sound in the word apple. “A is for apple.” Depending on the specific goal of instruction, student and teacher work on writing the symbols (encoding) or reading them (decoding).
The next step in stage 1 is to begin putting pieces together. For example, sounds can be blended together or new sounds can be created by a combination of symbols. “Remember that “C” makes a certain sound? Remember “A”? Remember “T”? Let’s sound all three out.” CAT. Good job! You used three sounds of the alphabet to make a word.” A combination of something like “C” and “H” form a digraph, a new sound using old letters. “B” and “L” together are a blend of two consonants. The letters, blends, and digraphs are the backbone of phonemic awareness and phonics.
A student completes this stage with mastery of the sounds and their symbols. In English, this would mean recognizing the letters and their corresponding phonemes. Essentially, they are ready to attack and decode almost any words they come across.
The second stage of instructional focus is basically stitching the sounds and blends together as to form longer, multisyllabic words. Students may now find themselves with puzzles in front of them! Words can have different blends, digraphs, or other combinations. The cognitive load on early readers increases greatly at this stage, and as a result, strategies are now employed to aid students in decoding what is written before them. Much fascinating literature has been written about this. Slowly, we work on two, three, and more syllables. Students with the proper foundation of stage one will now work to decode syllable by syllable.
At this stage, some students seem to take longer than others. Things can get a little foggy. Impediments cannot always be readily seen. Teachers look for milestones and benchmarks to try to figure out what might be slowing down their students.
There is a third stage of instruction that focuses on fluency, speed, and accuracy when reading a text. But for this article, we will keep our focus on the second stage.
Chunking
In stage two, when students are learning to decode multisyllabic words, there are numerous strategies and methodologies that are employed. One of the fundamental strategies that students are taught is called chunking. Chunking breaks words into chunks. The broken pieces of the longer word are more manageable for students. Another term for this is syllabication. For a six-syllable word, chunking will break it into six pieces. Instead of processing a bigger word, students go bit by bit.
The simplest type of chunking, called phonological chunking, is to break up a word according to syllables. The word “unbelievable” is chunked to become “un-be-liev-a-ble.” A student who was given the foundations discussed above will be able to decode this word phonologically, albeit piece by piece. Phonological chunking is intuitive, as syllables provide “natural” places to break the word up. This is much better than decoding on a letter-by-letter, or phoneme-by-phoneme basis.
An alternative method of chunking is dividing the word morphologically. This means to split the word not according to sounds but according to the smallest units of meaning, which we call morphemes. Instead of a student approaching a word syllable by syllable, they approach the word by recognizing the root word, suffixes, and prefixes. The recognition of these words is what aids the student in decoding the word.
Our example from above was “unbelievable”. We phonologically divided it into five chunks. Morphologically, we would divide it into three chunks. Un-believe-able. We have a root word “believe”, accompanied by the prefix “un” and the suffix “able”.
| Phonological chunking | Morphological chunking |
| The word is chunked by the sounds (phonemes, blends, digraphs, etc.) it contains | The word is chunked by the units of meaning (morphemes) it contains |
| Unbelievable –> Un-be-liev-a-ble | Unbelievable –> Un-believ(e)-able |
Clearly, a student who is struggling with fluency in reading needs to have prior knowledge of certain things in order to morphologically divide a word. They must know and be able to recognize the root of a given word, and they must also know and be able to recognize common prefixes and suffixes. Because of this, many consider morphological chunking to be more difficult for new readers. Nevertheless, there are many advantages of morphological chunking. In fact, while most people don’t realize it, fluent readers use morphemes to decode words instead of phonemes.
Challenges of Morphological Chunking
For morphological chunking, students must be familiar with root words, prefixes, and suffixes, as the technique depends on understanding; morphemes are the smallest unit of meaning. This means that for new words, they must have been taught the root and appropriate prefix and suffix in advance. For example, they must know the word “believe” and the various prefixes and suffixes that can form different words and combinations of meaning. In contrast, students need no background knowledge to be able to read a word according to its smallest units of sound. In fact, nonsense words can be chunked phonologically without any trouble.
Since morphological chunking requires prior knowledge or explicit instruction, it is less common at earlier stages with emerging readers. However, a student who knows the morphemes will be able to morphologically break up words just as easily as a student who knows the phonemes can phonologically break up words. And just as students are taught phonemes, they can be taught morphemes. In fact, this is something we already do. We teach students suffixes like “ing”, “ed”, and “es” in an early grade. The students learn the meaning and how to quickly decode these parts of words.
Morphological chunking demands that the reader find the root of the word first. In many Hebrew words, there is an obvious three-letter root (shoresh). Yet, at times shorashim do not appear in their pure form. Many shorashim can appear in forms of even two letters in a word. This does present a challenge, especially for early readers who have not encountered the word in this form before. The fact that shorashim can lose a letter is taught in the course of most shoresh vocabulary programs. For example, one very common shoresh, .ע.ש.ה, regularly drops its final letter. This is often (and should always be) taught to students when they learn the shoresh. This is not uniquely a problem in Hebrew. The roots of words in English are much harder to find, as they are often spelled differently. Yet, students are taught to find these roots in the course of many reading and vocabulary programs.
Advantages of Morphological Chunking
The purpose of chunking using morphemes is the same reason we chunk in the first place: to reduce the cognitive load of the reader. Morphological chunking is something that advanced readers do, but nevertheless, it has a place even for someone who is still struggling to decode multisyllabic words. Additionally, it seems to offer certain benefits to early readers, especially with students who struggle with learning to read, and especially in lashon hakodesh, where the root, prefixes, and suffixes tend to be easier to identify. Let’s use a word in lashon hakodesh as an example to highlight some advantages of morphological chunking.
ושמרנו
| Phonological chunking | Morphological chunking |
| 4 syllables: ו-ש-מר-נו | 3 morphemes: ו-שמר-נו |
I teach Chumash to fourth-grade boys. In our school, students at that age have already been learning shorashim, tchiliot, and sofiotfor some time. They have also received years of instruction in the content and skills of learning Chumash, as well as the interface between Chumash and Rashi, or other accompanying texts. My Chumash lesson is a cholent of all of these things happening at once, and the students are expected to be able to bring these skills to bear as they read the Chumash. Of course, there is plenty of explicit instruction at times whenever new milim, shorashim, or concepts are introduced.
Advantage 1 – Cognitive Load
In this setting, there are definite advantages of breaking words into morphemes in order to help a struggling reader decode. The first benefit is that it reduces the cognitive load. A long word without meaning is like a puzzle, and reading such a word fluently demands a lot of brain power. On the other hand, a student who already knows the morphemes in lashon hakodesh (and this is the expectation at this grade level) sees chunks of meaning before them. Like any other skill, students must be taught how to make a habit of: “Identify the shoresh first and then identify the prefixes and suffixes.” But once they get used to reading this way, the cognitive load is greatly reduced.
| Phonological chunking | Morphological chunking |
| More cognitive load: breaking a word into (meaningless) syllables as you decode it | Less cognitive load: Breaking a word into a (meaningful) root and the (meaningful) prefix and (meaningful) suffix |
Advantage 2 – Meaning
This built-in meaning is the second advantage of morphological chunking. Decoding by way of morphology gives students meaning immediately. Their mind is on the pieces of meaning and not individual sounds. This aids in reading comprehension, as the comprehension is more immediate alongside the reading. This just does not happen when a student plows through a long word phonologically.
| Phonological chunking | Morphological chunking |
| The decoded word is still meaningless – finding meaning is a second cognitive process | The decoded word is full of meaning, with a verb root and a prefix and suffix to modify it |
Advantage 3 – Reading without Nikud
A third advantage is when students begin to read Hebrew text written without nikud. Anyone who has taught students trying to read words without nikud can relate to the experience of the student getting lost, not even knowing where the syllables are, or how the letter blends are supposed to be aligned. Without nikud, and without meaning, there is no indicator of how to read the word. Take our example word ושמרנו. A student may start sounding out the letters, but they will soon get lost among the trees (the individual letters) and not see the forest (a word with meaning). On the other hand, a student who is habituated to identify morphemes sees a shoresh right away. Once the shoresh is identified, they can see the suffixes and prefixes too, and they know how to read the word.
| Phonological chunking | Morphological chunking |
| Without nekudos, ושמרנו can be pronounced many ways, and each would lead the reader to a different meaning | Without nekudos, the reader finds the root ש-מ-ר in ושמרנו, guiding him to the correct pronunciation and meaning |
In conclusion, there exists an alternative approach to helping children decode that involves comprehension built right into chunking. Morphological chunking is a skill that teachers of kriah should be teaching their students as an advanced form of decoding. (The same is true for English.) Being cognizant of the various types of chunking can make a difference for girls or boys who are struggling readers but already have the maturity to understand the morphology of lashon hakodesh.
Jordan Blitstein is a fourth-grade rebbi and a middle school Hebrew reading instructor at Yeshiva of Central Queens. He is a close talmid and musmach of Rabbi Baruch Simon. Prior to working in YCQ, he was a teacher in a specialized English reading intervention program for yeshiva students in the Lawrence, NY, school district.