Reading vocabulary influences in phonological recoding during the development of reading skill: a re-examination of theory and practice

Children’s skill at recoding graphemes to phonemes is widely understood as the driver of their progress in acquiring reading vocabulary. This recoding skill is usually assessed by children’s reading of pseudowords (e.g., yeep) that represent “new words.” This study re-examined the extent to which pseudoword reading is, itself, influenced by orthographic rimes (e.g., eep) of words of the child’s reading vocabulary, during the development of reading skill. In Study 1, children with word reading levels of 6–10 years read matched pseudowords that do and do not share an orthographic rime with words of their reading vocabularies. Study 2 was conducted to further examine such a comparison for children of the 6- to 8-year word reading levels. There was a small and constant advantage of shared lexical orthographic rimes for children with reading levels 6–8 years but from 8 to 10 years that advantage increased significantly, as expected by Ehri’s phase account of word reading development. The pseudoword reading of children learning to read English involves use of lexical orthographic components as well as context-free recoding of graphemes to phonemes. This implies a qualification to the common interpretation of pseudoword reading as a measure of context-free grapheme–phoneme recoding. Such a measure should use selected pseudowords that do not share orthographic rime units or other multigrapheme components with words of the children’s reading vocabularies.     

Preparing novice teachers to develop basic reading and spelling skills in children

This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of the teachers. Teachers’ word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Tutored children were assessed on several measures of basic reading and spelling skills. Novice teachers who received word-structure instruction outperformed a comparison group of teachers in word-structure knowledge at post-test. Tutored children improved significantly from pre-test to post-test on all assessments. Teachers’ post-test knowledge on the graphophonemic segmentation and irregular words tasks correlated significantly with tutored children’s progress in decoding phonetically regular words; error analyses indicated links between teachers’ patterns of word-structure knowledge and children’s patterns of decoding progress. The study suggests that word-structure knowledge is important to effective teaching of word decoding and underscores the need to include this information in teacher preparation.     

Morphological awareness and learning to read Chinese

This study investigated the nature of morphological awareness and its relation to learning to read Chinese characters among 46 Chinese-speaking preschool children. The children took a morphological awareness task, which varied in semantic transparency and morpheme position. Children’s vocabulary knowledge and extant character reading ability were measured. Additionally, a character learning task was administered. Results showed that children’s performances on morphological awareness were affected by semantic transparency but not by morpheme position. Morphological awareness was related to vocabulary knowledge when partialling out character reading ability but not to character reading ability after partialling out vocabulary knowledge. The results of the character learning task further revealed that morphological awareness was related to character identification in the words that were just taught but not to character identification in the words that were not taught or in pseudowords. The relation between morphological awareness and character identification ceased to be significant when partialling out the variance in children’s prior knowledge of the characters to be learnt. Taken together, the findings suggested that vocabulary knowledge may play a more important role than reading ability in the initial development of morphological awareness and that the facilitative effect of morphological knowledge in reading does not seem to be significant in the very initial stages of reading acquisition.     

Teachers enacting a technology-rich curriculum for emergent literacy

PictoPal is the name of a technology-rich curriculum with a focus on emergent literacy of Dutch kindergarteners. A case study design was used to examine teacher technology integration within PictoPal along with their perceptions about teaching/learning, technology and technology-based innovations. Observations were undertaken on pupils’ engagement and teachers’ technology integration within PictoPal. Interviews were used to examine teachers’ perceptions. Pupils’ emergent literacy learning was examined in a nonequivalent control quasi experimental design. Four kindergarten teachers and four classes (N = 95 pupils) participated in the use of PictoPal. The findings suggest that a high extent of technology integration is related to: a developmental approach to teaching/learning; positive attitudes and expectations towards technology-based innovations; and positive perceptions of support in stressful work conditions. Significant learning gains were found for the experimental group using PictoPal. High pupil learning gains were not related to a high extent of technology integration. Senior kindergarteners engaged to a higher extent with PictoPal than junior kindergarteners.     

Academic vocabulary and middle school English learners: an intervention study

The goal of this experimental intervention study was to determine if evidence-based instructional strategies for general vocabulary words are effective with middle school English learner (EL) students and academic vocabulary words. Participants showed significantly more growth in their knowledge of academic vocabulary during the treatment condition than during the control condition. A secondary goal of this study was to examine the predictive utility of students’ English language proficiency, and students’ general vocabulary knowledge in English was a positive predictor for their academic vocabulary growth during the intervention. However, participants’ growth during the control period had the greatest predictive utility for their growth during the intervention. Furthermore, this relationship was negative, suggesting that the intervention had the greatest benefits for students who made the least progress in English vocabulary in the absence of the intervention. Implications for instruction, policy, and future research are presented.     

The learn NC model

The vastness of the World Wide Web is both its attraction and its challenge. For people with a high-speed connection, plenty of time, and experience with technology, the Web can be a wonderful resource. Unfortunately, most teachers needing instructional resources for their classrooms do not have these assets. LEARN NC was created with this mainstream of teachers in mind, and to a great extent we have made the Web more accessible to them. Although we cannot give them more or faster Internet connections, we can help them make more efficient use of the time they have by making resources easy to use and providing training. We have been most successful when we have been able to “boil down” the content of the World Wide Web into a more manageable form. This requires a difficult balancing act: in order to provide as much good educational content as possible, we are constantly expanding our resources, but this growing content must be kept manageable and easy to access, or teachers will not be willing or able to use it. As a result, we must continually refine our existing resources. With these refinements, we believe—and our participating teachers concur—that our “one-stop-shopping” approach to educational technology is a helpful one for teachers and can provide a useful model for educators elsewhere     

Exploring teachers’ perceived self efficacy and technological pedagogical content knowledge with respect to educational use of the World Wide Web

Research in the area of educational technology has claimed that Web technology has driven online pedagogy such that teachers need to know how to use Web technology to assist their teaching. This study provides a framework for understanding teachers’ Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge-Web (TPCK-W), while integrating Web technology into their pedagogical practice. Furthermore, contemporary educational researchers have highlighted the significance of teachers’ self-efficacy, conceptualized as the teachers’ perceptions of their own competence at teaching, and related to instructional strategies as well as teaching effectiveness. The major purpose of this study was to investigate teachers’ perceived self-efficacy in terms of their TPCK-W. This study aimed to develop a new questionnaire, namely the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge-Web (TPCK-W) Survey to explore teachers’ self-efficacy in terms of their TPCK-W, and additionally to assess their attitudes toward Web-based instruction. The participants in this study were 558 teachers from elementary school to high school level in Taiwan. Both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the TPCK-W survey developed in this study has satisfactory validity and reliability characteristics. The results indicate a lack of general knowledge about Web-related pedagogy amongst the teachers surveyed. The correlations between teachers’ self-efficacy in terms of their TPCK-W, their attitudes regarding Web-based instruction, and their background variables were also examined. Correlations were found between self-efficacy and positive attitudes to web-based instruction. Older and more experienced teachers were found to have lower levels of self-efficacy with respect to TPCK-W, though teachers with more experience of using the web (including for instruction) had higher levels of self-efficacy with respect to TPCK-W.     

Development of self-efficacy towards using alternative assessment scale

Determining the candidate teachers’ opinions regarding self-efficacy towards alternative assessment will be beneficial in that this will improve their competencies while using these approaches in their applications within the classroom. In this article, the development and validation of the “Self-efficacy towards Using Alternative Assessment Scale” (SUAAS) is introduced. The SUUAS is a 26-item scale for assessing candidate teachers’ self-efficacy towards using alternative assessment. Data collected from 424 candidate teachers provide evidence for the validity and reliability of the scale. The results provide evidence for a valid and reliable self-efficacy scale with 3 factors, which are named as “Self-efficacy towards Using”, “Self-efficacy towards Challenges” and “Self-efficacy towards Using Sources”. The Cronbach’s alpha value of the entire scale has been found as 0.89, while those of the sub-factors are 0.88, 0.86 and 0.71, respectively. Followed by additional validation studies, the SUAAS will serve as a valuable tool for both instructors and researchers in education to assess teachers’ and candidate teachers’ beliefs related to their self-efficacy towards using alternative assessment approaches.     

Unconventional word segmentation in Brazilian children’s early text production

An important element of learning to read and write at school is the ability to define word boundaries. Defining word boundaries in text writing is not a straightforward task even for children who have mastered graphophonemic correspondences. In children’s writing, unconventional word segmentation has been observed across a range of languages and contexts with more occurrences of hyposegmentation (failure to separate two or more written words with a space) than hypersegmentation (written words are split into more than one segment). However, it is still unclear how frequent these errors are and the relationships of these written error patterns to the child’s development in oral language, spelling and reading remains relatively unexplored. To address these issues, unconventional written lexical segmentations in Brazilian Portuguese children’s text production during their first years at primary school (Year 1 to Year 3) were examined in relation to different cognitive and linguistic measures and patterns of spelling errors. Results reveal that in Portuguese the establishment of word boundaries in written text is not explained by visuospatial skills or limitations in processing resources (working memory). In contrast higher occurrences of hyposegmentation patterns were associated with lower levels of reading, vocabulary, verbal ability and morphological awareness whereas hypersegmentations were rarer and related to lower levels of reading and morphological awareness and typically only occurred in the initial stages of learning to write (Year 1). Occurrences of hyposegmentations as well as hypersegmentations were also related to spelling errors which reflected children’s poor phonological skills.     

What Can the Teacher Learn in the Classroom?

Our research is concerned with teacher’s knowledge, and especially with teacher’s processes of learning, in the classroom, from observing and interacting with students’ work. In the first part of the paper, we outline the theoretical framework of our study and distinguish it from some other perspectives. We argue for the importance of distinguishing a kind of teacher’s knowledge, which we call didactic knowledge. In this paper, we concentrate on a subcategory of this knowledge, namely observational didactic knowledge, which grows from teacher’s observation and reflection upon students’ mathematical activity in the classroom. In modeling the processes of evolution of this particular knowledge in teachers, we are inspired, among others, by some general aspects of the theory of didactic situations. In the second part of the paper, the model is applied in two case studies of teachers conducting ordinary lessons. In conclusion, we will discuss what seems to be taken into account by teachers as they observe students’ activity, and how in-service teacher training can play a role in modifying their knowledge about students’ ways of dealing with mathematical problems.     

The Effect of Questioning Style During Storybook Reading on Novel Vocabulary Acquisition of Preschoolers

The effects of adult questioning on children’s novel word acquisition during storybook reading were investigated. Three-year-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: vocabulary eliciting questions, noneliciting questions, and no questions (control). General vocabulary comprehension and novel word knowledge were equivalent across the groups before the storybook reading intervention. Children were read 3 storybooks repeatedly across 4 reading sessions and were tested for production and comprehension of novel words in the final session. Children’s novel word comprehension increased more in both question conditions than in the control condition, suggesting that type of question is not as important to word learning as children’s active engagement in discussion about novel words in general. Novel word production was not strongly affected by any of the reading conditions. However, asking children noneliciting questions did appear to foster production of new words more than not asking questions at all.     

Understanding the Active Ingredients in an Effective Preschool Vocabulary Intervention: An Exploratory Study of Teacher and Child Talk During Book Reading

Research Findings: In order to identify the active ingredients in an effective professional development intervention focused on enhancing preschool vocabulary instruction, this study examines the frequency with which teachers and children discussed theme-related vocabulary words during shared book reading. Head Start teachers received 1 year of training focused upon early vocabulary development. Children's vocabulary skills were assessed in the fall and spring of the school year. In spring, teachers read a storybook to their classroom, and teachers’ and children's remarks about theme-related vocabulary during the reading—including contextualized and decontextualized statements as well as verbatim repetitions of one another's statements—were coded. Practice or Policy: Results of multilevel models showed that more frequent references to thematic vocabulary by teachers were linked to stronger child vocabulary development. Although children's vocabulary references were not uniquely predictive of vocabulary learning, teachers’ repetition of children's remarks contributed to children's vocabulary gains.     

Hearing Words,Learning Words: How Different Presentations of Novel Vocabulary Words Affect Children’s Incidental Learning

Research Findings: Children learn most of their vocabulary incidentally, by hearing words used in their environment. This study explored which kinds of presentations of words, without any direct instruction, yielded greater depth of target word knowledge. Changes in 56 kindergartners’ depth of knowledge for each of 23 novel target words (N = 1,288) based on presentation in 1 of 3 conditions (read-aloud, teacher conversation, or both read-aloud and conversation) were explored and compared to control words that were never presented. A 2-level, cross-classification analysis modeled the postintervention score for each word for each child. Children’s word meaning knowledge improved most when words were presented via combined conversations and read-alouds. Vocabulary gains for words presented via conversations differed across classrooms. Practice or Policy: Both teacher conversations and read-aloud presentations of target vocabulary should be used together. Professional development for teachers’ effective vocabulary conversations may be needed.     

Factors Affecting Teachers’ Adoption of Technology in Classrooms: Does School Size Matter?

Researchers in educational technology have searched for factors to explain teachers’ acceptance and resistance to using technology for instruction. Among the many identified factors, however, organizational and school factors have not yet been explored and discussed. This study investigates the effects of school size on science and mathematics teachers’ adoption of technology in classrooms. Using national survey data collected from 940 science and mathematics teachers at junior high schools in Taiwan, we employed factor analyses, log-linear analyses, and three-way ANOVA techniques to examine interactions among school factors and teacher factors. Results obtained from the log-linear analyses suggested that both the interactions of school region with school size and school size with technology users were needed to explain teachers’ use of educational technology in classrooms. It appears that teachers at small schools were more likely to use technology for instructional purposes. Additionally, results of the study revealed that teachers at small schools tended to have positive attitudes toward technology use and that among users of educational technology in southern Taiwan, teachers at small schools designed and used significantly more instructional activities with technology. This study suggests that small schools provide a better environment for science and mathematics teachers to implement educational technology in instruction.     

Teacher perceptions of professional development needs and the implementation of the K-6 science and technology syllabus

This study examines teacher perceptions regarding professional development practices used in a region of the NSW Department of School Education to support the implementation of the K-6 Science and Technology Syllabus. The findings from a survey of 97 teachers indicate that teachers have a preference for ‘traditional’ models of in-service which may not bring about significant changes. Teachers also perceive that change is brought about through the influence of external factors such as in-service and resources which are not directly the responsibillity of individual teachers. This contrasts with the perception that the inability to change is due to internal personal qualities. Specializations; K-6 teacher education in science and technology education, children's learning in science and technology.     

Preschool Teachers’ Implementation of Vocabulary Strategies During Shared Reading: a Comparative Study

Research Findings: Shared reading is reported to be the single best instructional practice for emergent literacy skills. Vocabulary instruction practices implemented during shared reading by both Head Start (HS) teachers and teachers from more affluent private school settings were compared to determine whether there were differences between the 2 groups of teachers in their implementation of research-based practices. HS teachers implemented vocabulary instruction practices during shared reading more often, and chose different words to instruct, than private school teachers. Whereas 78% of HS teachers provided some vocabulary instruction during shared reading, only 59% of private school teachers did so. Among those teachers who provided vocabulary instruction during shared reading, HS teachers used significantly more contextualization strategies for word instruction than private school teachers. These findings suggest that preschool teachers who work with children from high-needs backgrounds use vocabulary instruction during shared reading as a way to bolster children’s vocabularies more frequently than teachers working in private preschools that serve children from more privileged backgrounds. Extratextual language was also compared, and private school teachers had a higher mean length of utterance and type–token ratio than the HS teachers. Practice or Policy: Professional development is recommended for preschool teachers to increase the implementation of best practices for vocabulary instruction during shared reading.     

Teachers’ acquisition of knowledge about English word structure

Previous research suggests that teachers’ knowledge about English word structure (e.g., the phonological structure of words and common orthographic patterns in English) may be limited, although this knowledge is important for effective teaching of word decoding. This study examined teacher education students’ knowledge about word structure, and improvements in their knowledge as a result of instruction, using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Participants came from a special education certification program and included both preservice and inservice teachers. Results indicated that prior preparation to teach reading influenced participants’ initial performance on two of the three word-structure tasks (all but graphophonemic segmentation); however, prior experience in teaching reading did not influence word-structure knowledge. A subset of participants who received specific instruction about word structure improved their knowledge relative to a comparison group of teacher education students who did not receive word-structure instruction. Prior preparation did not influence participants’ responsiveness to instruction. Conclusions support the viewpoint that teacher education must include information about English word structure for educators who will teach reading and suggest that sufficiently intensive instruction may be important in developing word-structure knowledge.     

Experienced Junior-High-School Teachers’ PCK in Light of a Curriculum Change: “The Cell is to be Studied Longitudinally”

In the new science and technology junior-high-school curriculum in Israel, it is recommended that the cell topic be taught “longitudinally in conjunction with other study contents”. This recommendation confers a change in teaching the cell topic and provides an opportunity to form meaningful relationships between biological phenomena at the macro-level and their cellular explanations. Here, we examine junior-high-school science and technology teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) with regard to the cell topic and the formation of macro-micro relations, ten years following the publication of the change in the curriculum. Teachers in this study participated in three focus groups (n = 59) and one workshop (n = 12). In addition, six experienced teachers were interviewed in the course of this study. Specific tools were developed to capture the teachers’ PCK. We found that the teachers had changed their way of teaching the cell topic only superficially: they did not undergo any deep change. Despite the importance the teachers placed on teaching and learning the cell topic, their concerns about their students’ comprehension difficulties reduced the time they devoted to teaching the topic in class. The teachers were also found to have no PCK capacity to integrate biological phenomena at the macro-level with their cellular explanations. In addition, a duality was identified among the teachers with regards to relating macro- and micro-levels in biology and in chemistry.