A subtraction experiment with six and seven year old children

This paper gives an account of an experiment involving 176 children of 6 and 7 years and their difficulties with subtraction problems. By using two screening questions, four levels of attainment were established and two teaching programmes were then devised to help the children forward to their next level. The results show that it is possible to assess a level of understanding in subtraction quickly and accurately and that, through the teaching programmes, pre-requisite skills needed to establish a sound foundation for subtraction can be taught. The experiment indicates, however, that an attempt to symbolise too soon is a danger to be avoided.     

Differences in reading strategies among 7 to 8 year old children

In the theoretical context of compensatory processing, the research studied the syntactic, semantic and grapho-phonic miscues made by groups of first year Junior school pupils of high, average and low reading attainments. 60 children aged between 7.5 and 8.5 years of age were asked to read aloud passages from the Neale Analysis of Reading Ability. All miscues were recorded and scored. Analyses of variance were then performed on these scores at two levels of text complexity. Reading attainment and sex were used as independent variables to test specified hypotheses related to miscue quality. The high reading attainment group typically made better quality syntactic, semantic and grapho-phonic miscues at the lower level of text complexity. Passage complexity affected the ability of some children to make effective use of syntactic and semantic cues. As text complexity increased, the miscue quality of high and above average reading attainment groups deteriorated. Higher scores on a word recognition reading test were significantly related to effective use of grapho-phonic miscues, but not to the use of syntactic and semantic cues, in reading material from more demanding texts. Limitations in the methodology used and suggestions for future work are discussed.     

Learning a transparent orthography at five years old: reading development of children during their first year of formal reading instruction in Wales

This study compared the early reading development of five‐year‐old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English‐speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction. Teaching methods in both schools emphasised phonics. The reading, letter recognition and phonological awareness skills of the children were tested at three points in the year (November 1998, March 1999 and June 1999). By March, the children who were learning to read in Welsh were performing better than the English‐speaking group at word recognition. The English‐speaking children showed some improvement in their ability to read regular words across the three test phases, but no significant improvement in their ability to read irregular words. The children learning to read in Welsh also performed better on a phoneme counting task in March and June than the English‐speaking children. Both groups performed similarly on tests of letter recognition throughout the year. The results suggest that a transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward.     

Attitudes to reading at ages nine and eleven

A survey was conducted with the aim of identifying attitudes towards reading amongst upper primary pupils, and establishing whether these attitudes had changed over the five‐year period from 1998 to 2003. A sample of 5076 pupils in Years 4 and 6 completed questionnaires. Attitudes were generally positive, but declined somewhat between the younger and older of these age groups. A sub‐sample of 2364 of these pupils were in the same schools where the same questionnaire had been completed in 1998. Enjoyment of reading had significantly fallen over the five years, whilst confidence as readers had significantly increased over the same period. The changes may be related to the introduction of the National Literacy Strategy, but other explanations are also possible.     

Predicting reading performance during the first and the second year of primary school

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the developmental antecedents of reading performance and its subcomponents from the beginning of the first year to the end of the second year of primary school. One‐hundred‐and‐fourteen seven‐year‐old Finnish‐speaking children were tested on reading‐related skills during their first week of school using a test battery designed for school entrants. Following this they were examined six times on word reading and reading comprehension skills. The results showed that the reading‐related variables predicting reading performance varied according to the phase of reading development. Moreover, partially different antecedents predicted word reading and reading comprehension. Word reading was associated with letter knowledge and listening comprehension, whereas initial word reading skill and listening comprehension were highly associated with the development of reading comprehension. The results support the development of reading instructional methods that take into account these differences in the components of reading performance and their development.     

The effect of inter-letter spacing on reading performance and eye movements in typically reading and dyslexic children

Recent studies have suggested that an increase of inter-letter spacing may improve reading performance of dyslexic readers by reducing visual crowding. However, these results have been difficult to replicate.This study directly compares reading accuracy and comprehension, as well as reading speed, and number and duration of fixations of 38 dyslexic and 32 typically reading children (10–14 years old) in regular, spaced (+2,5 pt), and condensed (−1,5 pt) conditions using a natural sentence-reading paradigm.Inter-letter spacing did not affect reading accuracy, comprehension, or speed. The lack of effects of inter-letter spacing was observed in both dyslexic and typical readers. Inter-letter spacing did not impact the number of fixations, but increased inter-letter spacing led to shorter fixations in dyslexic children. Decreased inter-letter spacing resulted in longer fixations in both groups.These results do not support the claim that dyslexics are more influenced by crowding than age-matched controls.     

Use of apostrophes by six to nine year old children

This paper investigated six to nine year old children's ability to use contractive and possessive apostrophes, the effects of type and token frequency, and the effect of teaching on this ability. Apostrophes provide an interesting opportunity to examine the basis of frequency effects in rule inference, as type and token frequencies dissociate in apostrophes found in children's early reading materials. Teaching effects are now open to inspection as the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching lays down a specific and detailed curriculum and teaching timetable. Results showed that token but not type frequency influenced children's correct use of apostrophes. There were also effects of teaching.     

Talking and Learning in Pairs: a comparison of two interactive modes for six and seven year old pupils

This paper suggests that British research has imposed an unsuitable model of collaborative learning upon six and seven year old pupils, and draws upon theories of play and upon American research to argue a case for ‘Sidework’, a modified form of associative interaction. A small scale study of thirteen dyads working at number tasks found that Sidework gave rise to more high order talk and to more post‐test learning than did collaboration. It is suggested that its superiority lay in the greater opportunities which it gave pupils to discuss disagreements and to imitate each other's models, and in the fact that pupils were more at ease in this mode.     

Stress sensitivity and reading performance in Spanish: A study with children

This paper investigates the relationship between ability to detect changes in prosody and reading performance in Spanish. Participants were children aged 7–8 years. Their tasks consisted of reading words, reading non‐words, stressing non‐words and reproducing sequences of two, three or four non‐words by pressing the corresponding keys on the computer keyboard. Non‐word sequences were constructed with minimal non‐word pairs differing in a single phoneme (/kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) or in the stress pattern (/mípa/ ‐ /mipá/). Results showed that performance on phoneme contrast sequences (e.g. /kúpi/ ‐ /kúti/) predicted word reading. In contrast, performance on stress contrast sequences (e.g. /mípa/ ‐ /mipá/) predicted non‐word reading, but only when two‐non‐word sequences were analysed. This suggests that stress sensitivity may be one of the factors related to reading fluency as most errors at reading non‐words consisted of false starts and pauses between syllables. Results also showed that stress sensitivity (scored in two non‐word sequences) predicted stress assignment, and that knowledge of stress rules predicted both word and non‐word reading. This suggests that stress sensitivity may help in learning stress rules, and that knowledge of stress rules is relevant for reading.     

Visual search and reading comprehension in Chinese children: the mediation of word detection skill

Reading and Writing - The present study explored the mediating effect of word detection on the relationship between visual-spatial attention and reading comprehension in Chinese. The participants...     

Beginning readers' reading performance and reading habits

This study investigated the prospective relationships between reading performance and reading habits among Finnish children during the first and second grades of primary school. One hundred and ninety‐five children were examined twice during their first primary school year and once during the spring term of Grade 2. The results showed, first, that children's reading skills predicted their reading habits: the more competent in reading children were at the end of Grade 1, the more likely they were to engage in out‐of‐school reading one year later. Second, reading habits also predicted reading skills: the amount of out‐of‐school reading at the end of Grade 1 contributed to the development of word recognition skills.     

Visual stress theory and its application to reading and reading tests

This paper presents a theory of visual stress. The theory is applied to the assessment of symptoms of visual stress and its treatment with coloured filters. The theory has implications for standard reading assessments that relate both to the visual skills and the age of the children taking the tests. These implications are reviewed, with the conclusion that insufficient attention is paid to visual factors in reading, particularly in the design of reading tests.     

Cognitive styles and reading performance

Conclusion The cognitive style-reading connection appears to represent a case of promises not yet fulfilled. Further, it is dubious whether fulfillment is just around the corner. Certainly, one can question the one-cognitive-style-at-a-time approach that has been dominant thus far. The time may have come to think about cognitive styles along with other cognitive measures in combination. Multiple-regression and other multivariate techniques are clearly called for. Without any doubt, the Cronbach-Snow (1977) ATI approach deserves further consideration, not only in the sense of matching styles with instructional treatments in reading — what is called the capitalization approach — but also in the sense of devising methods that can serve a prosthetic function to overcome styles that are maladaptive for reading — a compensatory approach, in other words. The foregoing theme as well as others scattered through the paper could potentially be developed into systematic research proposals aiming to bridge the domains of cognitive style and reading performance. Loose ends abound in the present area, and much progress is possible if energy and imagination are applied to the task. It is my hope that this state-of-the-art article offers a modest step in that direction. This paper was presented as part of the Symposium on Cognitive Processes and Strategies in Reading at the 30th Annual Conference of the Orton Society, Indianapolis, November 1979.