The importance of phonological processing skills for older low‐progress readers

The important role of phonological awareness in learning to read has become widely accepted. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of phonological processing skills when attempting to assist older low‐progress readers to develop literacy skills. While researchers generally agree that the key variables in reading acquisition (letter sound knowledge and phonological awareness) influence a student’s ability to understand and implement the alphabetic principle, it is still unresolved, however, whether or not the absence of these variables is sufficient to categorise a student as dyslexic. Furthermore it is unclear as to whether or not the research on beginning reading practices should inform the development of instructional programs for older low‐progress readers. Despite a move away from traditional discrepancy criteria towards a more phonologically based definition of reading disability, the current researchers conclude that the adoption of a non‐categorical approach to reading disability is the most helpful for remediation practices for older low‐progress readers. This contrasts with the current pursuit of some researchers to diagnose a set of underlying causes through the development of phonological testing batteries. It is concluded that reading disability is best understood by a continuum model, where the difficulties in reading are influenced by two major causal factors; phonological ability and quality of literacy learning environment.     

Reading achievement and reading self-concept – Testing the reciprocal effects model

Although there is a vast amount of research on reading motivation, evidence for bidirectional associations between reading self-concept and reading achievement is still missing, whereas there is compelling empirical evidence that suggests reciprocal effects between academic self-concept and achievement in other domains. This paper aimed to rigorously test reciprocal effects between reading self-concept and reading achievement within a longitudinal design comprising four waves of data collection. Drawing on a sample of N = 1508 secondary school students, results of structural equation modeling yielded support for reciprocal effects between reading self-concept and reading achievement. Strong support was found for the skill-development hypothesis, i.e. achievement predicting self-concept. Moreover, the self-enhancement hypothesis (self-concept predicting achievement) was corroborated in early years of secondary school. Thus, to best support poor readers, reading skills should perhaps be fostered by boosting the reading skill itself and reading self-concept, the latter particularly at the beginning of secondary school.     

Reading,syntactic, and working memory skills of bilingual Portuguese-English Canadian children

The purpose of the study was to examine the nature of language, memory, and reading skills of bilingual students and to determine the relationship between reading problems in English and reading problems in Portuguese. The study assessed the reading, language, and memory skills of 37 bilingual Portuguese-Canadian children, aged 9–12 years. English was their main instructional language and Portuguese was the language spoken at home. All children attended a Heritage Language Program at school where they were taught to read and write Portuguese. The children were administered word and pseudoword reading, language, and working memory tasks in English and Portuguese. The majority of the children (67%) showed at least average proficiency in both languages. The children who had low reading scores in English also had significantly lower scores on the Portuguese tasks. There was a significant relationship between the acquisition of word and pseudoword reading, working memory, and syntactic awareness skills in the two languages. The Portuguese-Canadian children who were normally achieving readers did not differ from a comparison group of monolingual English speaking normally achieving readers except that the bilingual children had significantly lower scores on the English syntactic awareness task. The bilingual reading disabled children had similar scores to the monolingual reading disabled children on word reading and working memory but lower scores on the syntactic awareness task. However, the bilingual reading disabled children had significantlyhigher scores than the monolingual English speaking reading disabled children on the English pseudoword reading test and the English spelling task, perhaps reflecting a positive transfer from the more regular grapheme phoneme conversion rules of Portuguese. In this case, bilingualism does not appear to have negative consequences for the development of reading skills. In both English and Portuguese, reading difficulties appear to be strongly related to deficits in phonological processing.     

Learning to read Chinese: Semantic,syntactic, phonological and working memory skills in normally achieving and poor Chinese readers

Whereas many studies point to a positive relationship between phonological skills and reading in English, little is known about these relationships for children learning to read in a morphemic orthography such as Chinese. The aim of this study was to examine the relationships among reading ability, phonological, semantic and syntactic skills in Chinese. The participants were 196 grade 1 to grade 4 Chinese children in Hong Kong. A word recognition task in Chinese was developed and children who scored in the lowest quartile were classified as poor readers. The children were administered phonological tasks (tone and rhyming discrimination), semantic tasks (choosing similar words and sentences meanings), a syntactic task (oral cloze), and a working memory task. The results showed that word recognition was highly correlated with phonological skills and semantic processing, and was only moderately related to syntactic knowledge and working memory. Poor readers showed a significant lag in the development of these skills with the most significant problems at the phonological and semantic levels. Phonological skills are important to the acquisition of reading skills in both Chinese and English.     

Can individuals with Down syndrome acquire alphabetic literacy skills in the absence of phoneme awareness?

Two studies investigating the relationship betweenphoneme awareness and word reading ability in Downsyndrome (DS) are reported. The first study included33 Brazilian individuals with DS (mean age = 23years). They all had begun to read and all showedclear signs of phonological recoding skills. Thirty-three normal children (mean age = 7 years),matched with the individuals with DS for readingability, participated as controls. The second studyincluded individuals with DS with a wider range ofreading ability: a group of 46 readers (mean age = 22years) and a group of 47 nonreaders (mean age = 18years). The results question Cossu, Rossini, andMarshall's (1993a) claim that phoneme awareness is notrelated to alphabetic reading acquisition in DS.Although the individuals with DS who participated inthe first study performed rather poorly on a task thatpresupposes the ability to explicitly manipulatephonological representations, they performed quitewell on a task assessing the ability to detectphonemic similarities in words. We suggest that it wasthis ability that enabled them to acquire phonologicalrecoding skills as well as they did, despite theircognitive limitations. The results of the second studywere consistent with this interpretation. The abilityto detect phonemic similarities in wordssignificantly differentiated between the readers andthe nonreaders, even after we controlled forvariations in letter knowledge, intelligence, andchronological age.     

The role of question type and reading ability in reading comprehension

Performance on a standardized reading comprehension test reflects the number of correct answers readers select from a list of alternate choices, but fails to provide information about how readers cope with the various cognitive demands of the task. The aim of this study was to determine whether three groups of readers: normally achieving (NA), poor comprehenders (CD), with no decoding disability, and reading disabled (RD), poor comprehenders with poor decoding skills, differed in their ability to cope with reading comprehension task demands. Three task variables reflected in the question-answer relations that appear on standardized reading comprehension tests were identified.Passage Independent (PI) question can be answered with reasonable accuracy based on the reader's prior knowledge of the passage content.Inference (INFER) questions required the reader to generate an inference at the local or global test level.Locating (LOCAT) questions require the reader to match the correct answer choice to a detail explicitly stated in the text either verbatim or in paraphrase form. The relations among reader characteristics, cognitive task factors and reading comprehension test scores were analyzed using a structural relations equation with LISREL. It was found that the three reading groups differed with respect to the underlying relationship between their performance on specific question-answer types and their standardized reading comprehension score. For the NA group, a high score on PI was likely to be accompanied by a low score on INFER, whereas in the CD and RD groups, PI and INFER are positively related. The finding of a negative relationship between background knowledge and inference task factors for normally achieving readers suggests that even normal readers may have comprehension difficulties that go undetected on the basis of a standardized scores. This study indicates that current comprehension assessments may not be adequate for assessing specific reading difficulties and that more precise diagnostic tools are needed.     

Explaining social class differences in growth of reading skills from beginning kindergarten through fourth-grade: The role of phonological awareness,rate of access,and print knowledge

The aim of this longitudinal study was to further ourunderstanding of the reasons for social classdifferences in growth of decoding and readingcomprehension skills from beginning kindergarten throughchildren's fourth grade year. Participants wereenrolled in five public schools in a moderately sizedsouthern American city (n = 197). We examined ifbeginning kindergarten levels of three kinds ofreading related abilities explained social classdifferences in growth of reading skills during thetime periods of beginning kindergarten to children'sfirst-, second-, third-, and fourth-grade years. Thereading related abilities were phonological awareness,rate of access to phonological information inlong-term memory, and print knowledge. We found thatthe reasons for social class differences in growth ofreading skills depended on the time interval that wasconsidered. During the earliest time interval, socialclass differences in growth of decoding skills werecompletely accounted for by performance on the controlmeasures of general verbal intelligence and prior wordreading skills. During the remaining time periods,social class differences in growth of decoding andreading comprehension skills persisted whenperformance on the three kinds of reading relatedabilities and the control measures were accounted for. The greatest attenuation of SES differences in growthof reading skills occurred when beginning kindergartenlevels of print knowledge were taken into account.     

The longitudinal effect of morphological awareness on higher-order literacy skills among college L2 learners

The utilities of morphological awareness in first language (L1) literacy acquisition have been well documented. College second language (L2) learners with the need to enhance higher-level language and literacy competencies are of particular interest to literacy research. Therefore, this study reports on a longitudinal study that examines the multilayered relationship between morphological awareness and higher-order literacy skills (reading comprehension and written composition) among college-level English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. One hundred and twenty-one freshman students participated in this study. They finished reading vocabulary and four morphological awareness measurements including morpheme-form knowledge, morpheme-meaning knowledge, morpheme recognition ability and morpheme discrimination ability at the beginning of their college study. Moreover, they were required to complete reading and writing assessments at two additional time points over one academic year. Drawing upon multivariate analyses, the results showed that initial morphological awareness predicted later reading comprehension ability over the course of one academic year after controlling for reading vocabulary knowledge and the autoregressive effect. Although morphological awareness did not have a significant longitudinal effect on written composition after reading vocabulary knowledge and the autoregressive effect were accounted for, the results did exhibit the increasing robustness of the relationship between morphological awareness and written composition across time. In addition, the results verified the significant and longitudinal effect of explicit morphological knowledge (morpheme-form and morpheme-meaning knowledge) on higher-order literacy skills. The current study substantiated that morphological awareness had positive longitudinal relationships with higher-order literacy skills among EFL students. Implications centered on the utilities of morphological awareness components in higher-order literacy acquisition, the operationalization of written composition, and the uniqueness of second/foreign language literacy acquisition.     

Qualitative and quantitative differences among dyslexic,normal, and nondyslexic poor readers

This study tested the hypothesis that when a stringent criterion of normal IQ is applied in the selection of dyslexic readers, and when dyslexics, nondyslexic poor readers, and normal readers are matched on reading comprehension — rather than word reading — significant differences among these groups can be demonstrated. Two groups of poor readers from primary grades, one with normal IQ (dyslexics) and the other with below-average IQ (nonspecific reading disabled, NSRD) were matched for reading comprehension with a group of younger normal readers. The dyslexic group was found to be inferior to the other two groups in tests of decoding and spelling. The dyslexic readers were more context-dependent for word recognition than the other two groups. The NSRD group did not differ from the normal readers in these aspects but had the worst performance on a test of inferential comprehension. It was concluded that dyslexics differ from normal readers and low-IQ poor readers in word and nonword reading skills and context-dependency for reading. A group of six adult dyslexics were also found to be deficient in decoding skills. A lack of unanimity in the use of certain terminology, a substantial age difference between low-IQ poor readers and normals, and the difference in the criteria used for matching the different groups could be factors that can explain the disagreements seen between the findings of the present study and those reported by some other studies. Potential problems associated with reading-age matched experimental design are discussed.     

Patterns of analogical reasoning among beginning readers

Despite compelling evidence that analogy skills are available to beginning readers, few studies have actually explored the possibility of identifying individual differences in young children's analogy skills in early reading. The present study examined individual differences in children's use of orthographic and phonological relations between words as they learn to read. Specifically, the study addressed whether general analogical reasoning, short‐term memory and domain‐specific reading skills explain 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds' reading analogies (n=51). The findings revealed an orthographic analogy effect accompanied by high levels of phonological priming. Single‐word reading and use of visual analogies predicted young children's orthographic and phonological analogies in the regression analyses. However, different findings emerged from exploring profiles based on individual differences in reasoning skill. Indeed, when individual differences in composite scores of orthographic and phonological analogy were examined, group membership was predicted by word reading and early phonological knowledge, rather than general analogical reasoning skills. The findings highlight the usefulness of exploring individual differences in children's analogy development in the early stages of learning to read.     

The relationship of rapid serial naming and word reading in normally developing readers: An exploratory model

Even though researchers have established that rapid serial naming (RSN), or the ability to name within a restricted category of visual stimuli quickly, is a significant predictor of word reading, the predictive nature of RSN is not well understood. To investigate the relationship of RSN and other variables thought to contribute to beginning word reading (phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, memory span, processing speed, and articulation), a preliminary/exploratory model of word reading was developed and then tested by path analysis. Results indicated that no variable in the model could fully `explain' RSN; processing speed, but not articulation, contributed to RSN performance. RSN and orthographic knowledge were significantly related, but this relationship was due to the effects of processing speed. In terms of their unique contributions to the variance in word reading, RSN, phonological awareness, and orthographic knowledge were independent of each other. While these results pertain only to normal readers and are preliminary in nature, they may provide a basis for a clear interpretation of similar studies conducted with both normal and dyslexic readers.     

Exploration of the contribution of teachers’ knowledge about reading to their students’ improvement in reading

Recent studies of elementary teachers’ knowledge about reading have been built on the premise that teachers need thorough knowledge about language and reading processes, but these studies have provided only limited evidence that teachers’ performance on tests of such knowledge contributes to their students’ reading achievement. The present study was designed to examine the contribution of first- through third-grade teachers’ knowledge about early reading to their students’ improvement on tests of word analysis and reading comprehension, controlling for socio-demographic characteristics of students, their prior reading achievement, and teachers’ educational attainment, professional experiences, and socio-demographic characteristics. Preliminary analyses indicated that the test of teachers’ knowledge had adequate psychometric characteristics. However, performance on this measure of teachers’ knowledge did not significantly explain students’ improvement on the two reading subtests. The complexity of the factors that influence teachers’ knowledge acquisition and the context in which the study was carried out offer possible explanations for these results. In addition, teachers’ content knowledge about reading might not be closely associated with the practices they use in reading instruction, and therefore might not be significantly related to their students’ improvement in reading over a year.

读者阅读倾向与高校图书馆文献采访工作

通过对高校读者阅读倾向和图书馆文献采访现状的分析,揭示了读者阅读倾向与高校图书馆文献采访工作的内在联系。     

Subtypes of developmental dyslexia: The influence of definitional variables

The purpose of this study was to investigate the hypothesis that the manner in which a reading disability is defined will influence the conclusions that are made about the characteristics of the disability. To test this hypothesis, learning disabled and normally achieving children, aged 6 to 14, were administered tasks measuring grammatical, shortterm memory, phonological, reading, and visual-spatial skills. The poor readers were divided into groups of poor readers with

掌握英语阅读技巧提高英语阅读能力

在英语阅读过程中，读者应当摒弃一些贯用而不太合理的阅读方式，寻找到省时，省力并能准确领会文章的适合于自己的阅读方式，这就要求读者掌握一定的的阅读技巧，以提高自己的阅读能力。     

Growth in Precursor and Reading‐Related Skills: Do Low‐Achieving and IQ‐Discrepant Readers Develop Differently?

Poor readers who met low achievement and IQ‐discrepancy definitions of reading disability were compared with nonimpaired readers on their development of eight precursor and reading‐related skills to evaluate developmental differences prior to students’ identification as reading disabled. Results indicated no evidence for differences between the two groups of poor readers in the development of the eight skills, with three exceptions. Students in the IQ‐discrepant group demonstrated greater growth in letter sound knowledge, greater mean performance in visual‐motor integration at the beginning of first grade, and greater deceleration in rapid naming of letters. When compared to the nonimpaired group, low‐achieving readers demonstrated poorer performance and development in all skills, while the IQ‐discrepant readers demonstrated poorer performance and development in phonemic awareness, rapid naming of letters and objects, spelling, and word reading. The largely null results for comparisons between the two groups of poor readers challenges the validity of the two‐group classification of reading disabilities based on IQ‐discrepancy.     

Phonological processing, language comprehension, and reading ability

Previous research has indicated a relationship between reading ability and the integrity of certain phonological processing skills--skills that operate on the sound structure of language. This study shows how the deficient phonological processing skills of poor beginning readers can impair their comprehension of spoken phrases and sentences that are disambiguated by prosodic cues (i.e., pitch, stress, and pause). Following a brief summary of the available research literature, two new experiments are reported to illustrate that poor readers do not interpret certain sentences as accurately as good readers do, because they are less able to hold phonological material temporarily in working memory. Further insight into the basis of these differences between good and poor readers is provided by two additional pieces of evidence: The differences between good and poor readers are analogous to those between older and younger children readers, and the performance of poor readers tends to resemble that of younger children reading at their same level (i.e., reading-ability-matched controls). Apparently, good and poor readers tend to differ in the rate at which they develop phonological processing skills.     

Preparing special educators to teach reading and use curriculum-based assessments

Preparing special educators who are knowledgeable about evidence-based interventions for teaching reading to students with reading difficulties and who are capable of using curriculum-based assessments to monitor student progress and differentiate interventions is vital to the success of current school reform efforts. The primary purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the effect of tutoring and using assessment to monitor the progress of struggling readers on preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) knowledge and preparedness to teach reading. Also of interest was whether reading scores of tutored students improved. PSTs (n = 18) in an undergraduate reading methods course tutored at-risk second graders using an evidence-based intervention and monitored students’ progress weekly. PSTs made significant growth on a measure of teacher knowledge about the structure of language and on a survey of their preparedness to teach reading. A qualitative analysis of PSTs’ weekly reflections and final reports revealed that the majority used curriculum-based assessment data to describe students’ response to tutoring and were beginning to use that data to make instructional decisions. On average, tutored students improved reading fluency, but did not demonstrate significant growth in reading relative to national norms. Implications and limitations of the study are described and directions for future research are discussed.     

英语阅读及其智能和技能

英语阅读智能是指读者阅读英语时所需要的智力.它体现在阅读中的猜词能力、推理判断能力、概括能力等方面,在解决阅读理解问题中起着决定性作用.英语阅读技能是指读者阅读英语时所运用的技能.它包括用眼技能、阅读习惯、阅读方式等.本文旨在对英语阅读及其智能和技能在英语阅读中的作用进行分析和阐述.     

Cognitive constraints and the early learning goals in writing

This study examined the relative importance of a number of cognitive factors (i.e. working memory, vocabulary knowledge, general cognitive ability and reading skills) in accounting for differences in the rate of progress made by children in the development of emergent writing skills. Sixty-seven children were assessed on tasks measuring the visuospatial, phonological and central executive components of working memory. The children's written texts were analysed according to the assessment scale for writing from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile. The results indicate that reading performance and visuospatial memory skills are crucial to determining whether or not children aged 4–5 years are able to meet the UK government's prescribed educational standards for writing. The importance of visual skills in the acquisition of orthographic knowledge and writing conventions gained through reading is discussed in relation to current instructional strategies within schools.