Spelling and reading development: The effect of teaching children multiple levels of representation in their orthography

A novel intervention was developed to teach reading and spelling literacy to 5 to 7 year-old students using explicit instruction of morphology, etymology, phonology, and form rules. We examined the effects of the intervention compared to a phonics-based condition using a cross-over design with a baseline measure. One hundred and twenty children attending an English state funded primary school were randomly allocated either to a traditional phonics condition followed by the novel intervention, or to the novel intervention followed by the phonics condition. The novel intervention significantly improved the literacy skills of the children including both word reading and spelling compared with the phonics condition. We conclude that early teaching of English literacy should include instruction in morphology, etymology and rules about form in addition to traditional phonics. We suggest that the results of the study could inform future policy on the teaching of English literacy skills.     

Learning Morphological and Phonological Spelling Rules: An Intervention Study

We looked at the effects of teaching 7- and 8-year-old children morphological and phonological distinctions. Some of those given morphological training and some of those given phonological training were also taught how to represent these distinctions in writing. All 4 intervention groups did better than the control group in a standardized test of reading after the intervention. There were gains in children's use of morphological spelling rules but not in their use of conditional phonologically based spelling rules. The improvement in the use of morphological rules in spelling was confined to groups trained in morphology. Training in phonology also had a beneficial effect on the use of morphology in reading. The results are interpreted within the framework of a dual-route model of learning to read and spell.     

Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System

A large body of research supports the conclusion that early reading instruction in English should emphasize phonics, that is, the teaching of grapheme–phoneme correspondences. By contrast, we argue that instruction should be designed to make sense of spellings by teaching children that spellings are organized around the interrelation of morphology, etymology, and phonology. In this way, literacy can be taught as a scientific subject, where children form and test hypotheses about how their spelling system works. First, we review arguments put forward in support of phonics and then highlight significant problems with both theory and data. Second, we review the linguistics of English spellings and show that spellings are highly logical once all the relevant sublexical constraints are considered. Third, we provide theoretical and empirical arguments in support of the hypothesis that instruction should target all the cognitive skills necessary to understand the logic of the English spelling system.     

Deaf children's spelling: does it show sensitivity to phonology?

A written pictures to spelling task was given to two groups of children, 17 deaf children from signing schools (average age = 10.7) and 20 hearing children learning English as a second language (ESL, average age = 10.4). The stimuli were equally divided according to frequency, phonological regularity, and orthographic regularity. We predicted that the deaf group would not differ from the ESL group in the pattern of their responses across word classes, categorized in terms of the effect of frequency and phonological and orthographic regularity. Results showed that broadly this was the case, but more detailed analysis showed that the approach of the two groups was different. More specifically, the deaf children appeared to be sensitive to, but not aware of, phonology in their spelling, whereas the ESL group showed awareness of, as well as sensitivity to, phonology in their spelling.     

Spelling without phonology: A study of deaf and hearing children

To what extent does phonology play a role in spelling English words? The written responses of deaf students and groups of hearing children to five tasks were subjected to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The first three tasks were used to see if deaf students utilized phonology when they generated their own words and to compare their spelling performance with that of hearing subjects. The fourth and fifth tasks were designed to compare the spelling performance of deaf and hearing subjects when they were required to reproduce visually presented common words. Results showed that deaf students, who were chronologically much older, were not better spellers than hearing children from the fifth grade. Analysis of data revealed little evidence that the deaf students involved in the present study utilize phonology in spelling. Nor did word-specific visual memory for entire words appears to play a role in spelling by deaf students. Rote visual memory for letter patterns and sequences of letters within words, however, appears to play a role in the spelling by deaf students. It is concluded that sensitivity to the stochastic-dependent probabilities of letter sequences may aid spelling up to certain point but phonology is essential for spelling words whose structure is morphophonemically complex.

     

Follow-up of children with early expressive phonology disorders

Fifty-two children identified at age 4 to 6 years as demonstrating a moderate to severe expressive phonology disorder were followed to the third and fourth grades. Children were classified into two groups based on the presence of an early phonology disorder in isolation (P) or the presence of a phonology disorder with other language problems (PL). At follow-up, articulation measures failed to differentiate the groups; however, the PL group performed more poorly than the P group on measures of phoneme awareness, language, reading decoding, reading comprehension, and spelling. The P group demonstrated poor spelling skills relative to their reading and language abilities, suggesting residual spelling weaknesses in these children. The PL group reported more nuclear family members with speech-language disorders and with reading disorders than the P group. Findings support previous research linking early language disorders with later reading difficulties.     

论象似性及其在英语词汇教学中的运用

象似性理论对于索绪尔的语言任意性理论是一个有力的补充,对英语教学有着重要的指导作用。这种象似性也存在于英语词汇系统中,给教师在词汇教学方面提供了一个新的视角。从词源、语音、形态和语义等方面的规定及其分析,来探讨英语词汇的象似性在教学中的应用。     

Effects of psycholinguistic instruction on spelling performance

Two studies were conducted in which phonology‐based instructional strategies designed for improving spelling skills of elementary school children were compared against instruction strategies that relied only on visual exposure of words. The first study involved a total of 93 children. Of these, 46 were instructed by drawing their attention to the psycholinguistic nature of their spelling errors. The remaining 47 children in the comparison group were shown the correct version of all the words. In study II 15 children were placed in a treatment group and were taught phoneme awareness, and 15 children were placed in a comparison group and were exposed to printed words only. In both studies, posttests showed that children taught through psycholinguistic and phoneme awareness methods significantly outperformed the visual training groups. Further, these gains were retained after a period of 2 weeks. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Promotion of literacy skills in early childhood: a follow-up study from kindergarten to Grade 1 / Fomento de habilidades de lecto-escritura en la primera infancia: estudio de seguimiento desde la educación infantil al primer curso de educación primaria

Several researchers have shown that invented spelling activities in kindergarten foster preschool children’s early literacy skills. However, few studies have assessed its impact on learning to read and write in the first year of primary school. Our goal was to analyse the impact of an invented spelling programme with kindergarteners on their literacy skills until the end of Grade 1. A follow-up study was conducted with 45 five-year-old Portuguese children attending two classes of two schools in Lisbon. The teaching effect was controlled as children from each class were randomly assigned into two groups (experimental/control) — equivalent on letter knowledge, cognitive abilities and phonological awareness. The participants were assessed in kindergarten with a pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test (spelling; reading; phonemic awareness) and at the end of Grade 1 (spelling; reading). The experimental group participated in invented spelling sessions, while control children participated in storytelling activities. Data analysis revealed statistically significant differences between the two groups. The experimental group scored higher, not only in kindergarten but also in the follow-up year for all literacy measures.     

The linguistic base of initial reading and spelling in English: a tutorial review

ABSTRACT

This article summarises the linguistic base of initial reading and spelling in English for the benefit of teachers and others engaged in education who need explicit understanding of parts of the linguistic base in order to teach initial literacy accurately. The aspects covered are those most relevant to children entering formal schooling: spoken language as the foundation of literacy; phonetics and phonology; phoneme-grapheme and grapheme-phoneme correspondences; sequencing in phonics teaching; vocabulary, morphology and syntax; and the linguistic effects of reading to children. Several aspects are discussed from two angles, first describing the full system, then summarising where 5-year-olds have reached in their development towards it.     

The pathway to English word reading in Chinese ESL children: the role of spelling

The present longitudinal study investigated the role of spelling as a bridge between various reading-related predictors and English word reading in Chinese children learning English as a Second Language (ESL). One hundred and forty-one 5-year-old kindergarten children from Hong Kong, whose first language (L1) was Cantonese and second language (L2) was English, were administered tests of phonological awareness, letter knowledge, English vocabulary, spelling and English word reading at three time points (T1, T2 and T3) at 3-month intervals over a 6-month period. Nonverbal IQ was included as a control variable. The results showed that phonological awareness, letter knowledge and English vocabulary at T1 all predicted English word reading (T3) through spelling (T2). Further mediation analyses showed that, for phonological awareness and English vocabulary, full mediation effects were found. For letter knowledge, a partial mediation effect was observed. These results suggest that, in Chinese ESL kindergarteners, reading-related predictors foster word reading via spelling, a process that intersects phonology, orthography and semantics. Practical implications of these findings were also discussed.     

A Synthesis of Morphology Interventions and Effects on Reading Outcomes for Students in Grades K–12

This article synthesized the morphology intervention studies conducted in English with students in kindergarten through 12th grade between 1986 and 2006. Seven studies were identified as focusing primarily on morphology instruction, including roots and affixes, and measuring one or more reading‐related outcomes (e.g., word identification, spelling, vocabulary, reading comprehension). Of those studies meeting the criteria, three studies were focused on word identification, three were focused on vocabulary acquisition, and one was focused on spelling. Although there was a wide range in effect sizes computed for the various outcome measures (?.93 to 9.13), findings indicated that stronger effects were associated with root word instruction (as opposed to affixes alone) and with morphology instruction that targeted students' reading developmental level in an age of acquisition pattern. In addition, results suggested that morphology could successfully be combined with training in other skills without adding instructional time.     

Understanding Spelling

Stage models of learning to spell have not been helpful to teachers in teaching spelling. A three year project, based in three inner London primary schools, showed that although there is a developmental dimension to learning to spell, children nevertheless draw on several sources of knowledge from the outset. Reading and spelling are related but it is likely that phonemic understanding is gained more readily through spelling than it is in the context of reading. The project set out to examine how children develop as spellers and the nature of the links between children’s development in spelling, writing and reading. It examined the progress in spelling of two groups of children: a KS 1 group of children learning to read and write, and of a group of KS2 children who were fluent readers but who had spelling difficulties. The project also drew out the implications of its study for teachers and developed a spelling assessment framework to help teachers in analysing children’s spellings.     

Effects of Consistency and Age of Acquisition on Reading and Spelling among Developing Readers

Three experiments investigated the effects of rime consistency on reading and spelling among developing readers ranging in age from 7 to 11 years. Experiment 1 found that children read words with inconsistent feedforward mappings between orthography and phonology (O → P) less accurately than consistent words. OP consistency interacted with chronological age, word frequency and age-of-acquisition (AoA). The effect of OP consistency on reading was larger for younger children than for older children and OP consistency had an effect for low frequency words and late-acquired words only. Experiment 2 found an effect of feedforward consistency between phonology and orthography (P → O) on children’s spelling but no interaction between PO consistency and AoA. Experiment 3 showed that the effects of feedforward consistency are independent of feedback consistency. Our results challenge models of reading and spelling that assume feedforward consistency effects are influenced by the frequency of exposure to words only and we suggest that interactions between consistency and AoA depends on the ratio of consistent to inconsistent OP mappings.     

A possible contribution of word-retrieval difficulties to reading and spelling impairments

Good and poor readers at the junior high school level and good and poor spellers at the university level were compared on their ability to produce words in response to a semantic cue (a category name), a visual cue (three letters), and an auditory cue (a syllable rime). Kindergarten children were tested on a word-identification task and their retrieval of words in response to the semantic and auditory cues. At all ages, poor readers or spellers produced fewer words on all word-retrieval tasks than did good readers or spellers. Performance on the auditory and visual word-retrieval tasks correlated very highly with pseudoword reading and spelling ability in the two older groups; in the kindergarten children, auditory retrieval correlated with word identification. The results suggest that poor readers have not organized words in long-term memory according to rhyming families but that good readers have. We speculate that failure to retrieve rhyming words during acquisition of reading and spelling skills underlies the failure of poor readers and spellers to abstract the higher-order relationships between orthography and phonology.     

Effects of policy and educational interventions intended to reduce difficulties in literacy skills in grade 1

In two large-scale studies, the effects of policy and educational interventions on literacy skills were examined in children schooled in zones with specific educational needs. To calculate the potential effects of such interventions, treatment-effects estimators with nearest neighbor matching were used. In Study 1 with policy intervention (N = 1095), children in experimental group (Exp) were assigned to small classes (12 pupils) and others in control group (Cont) to normal-sized classes (20–25 pupils). At the end of Grade 1, the effect sizes in favor of Exp were .14 and .22 in word reading and spelling. In Study 2 with educational interventions (N = 2803), children in Exp benefit from an evidence-based practice, i.e. a code-focused intervention (phonology, letter knowledge, decoding and fluency) developed by the Association Agir pour l'Ecole (Act for School) and conducted by teachers in small groups for children with low performance at the beginning of Grade 1. The effect sizes of interventions in various literacy skills were from .12 to .32. This set of results obtained in France is in accordance with those described in other countries. To conclude, a double intervention with small classes and targeted educational approaches could be one of the best ways of reducing inequalities during learning to read.     

Learning to spell: raising standards in spelling and independent writing

This paper considers evidence from an intervention designed to raise standards in spelling and independent writing. The Complete Spelling Programme (McMurray and Fleming, 1998) is designed to ensure that all processes involved in learning to spell are activated and that the interaction between them is facilitated. In addition, a number of innovative features within the programme's design allow sources of spelling knowledge to be presented in a developmental sequence, allowing all children to learn together, regardless of their ability. The programme provides day‐to‐day spellings and an extensive range of follow‐up activities, clearly differentiated, linking spelling to wider literacy teaching, e.g. grammar, language understanding, punctuation. The impact of the programme on progress, not only in spelling tests but also in spelling accuracy and quality in independent writing, was assessed by means of a longitudinal study with a 2 × 2 quasi‐experimental design. The two independent variables were (i) experimental school (intervention) or control school (no intervention) and (ii) high or low social disadvantage. A sample of 81 children aged 5–6 years across the four schools was followed for three years from Year 2 to Year 4 (Northern Ireland). A range of quantitative measures was used for baseline assessment and to establish the quantifiable outcomes for children in both the experimental (N=43) and the control schools (N=38). Qualitative measures were used to illuminate the processes involved in the programme in the experimental schools (McMurray, 2004). At the end of the study pupils who had been taught using the programme had made significant improvement in spelling and independent writing. On the basis of the findings it is argued that spelling needs to be seen as an integral tool in raising standards in literacy and that it should not be taught in isolation from other literacy skills.     

Developing phonological awareness and word recognition skills: A two-year intervention with low-income,inner-city children

Low-income, inner-city children were involved in a two-year intervention delivered in the regular classroom by regular classroom teachers to develop phonological awareness and word recognition skills. For the treatment children, an 11-week phoneme awareness program in kindergarten was followed by a first grade reading program (extended to grade 2 for some children) that emphasized explicit, systematic instruction in the alphabetic code. Control children participated in the school district's regular basal reading program. Both groups participated in a phonetically-based spelling program mandated by the district. At the end of grade 1, treatment children (n = 66) significantly outperformed control children (n = 62) on measures of phonological awareness, letter name and letter sound knowledge, and three measures of word recognition, and reached marginal significance (0.056) on a fourth. They also significantly outperformed the control children on two measures of spelling. One year later, at the end of grade 2, the treatment children (n = 58) significantly outperformed the control children (n = 48) on all four measures of word recognition. For the groups as a whole, there were no differences on the one measure of spelling readministered at the end of grade 2. However, there were significant differences in spelling between the treatment (n = 16) and control children (n = 13) who remained in the bottom quartile of spellers at the end of grade 2 when partial credit was given for phonetically correct spelling, and significant differences in reading favoring these treatment children on all four measures of word recognition.     

Do dyslexics misread a ROWS for a ROSE?

Insufficient knowledge of the subtle relations between words’ spellings and their phonology is widely held to be the primary limitation in developmental dyslexia. In the present study the influence of phonology on a semantic-based reading task was compared for groups of readers with and without dyslexia. As many studies have shown, skilled readers make phonology-based false-positive errors to homophones and pseudohomophones in the semantic categorization task. The basic finding was extended to children, teens, and adults with dyslexia from familial and clinically-referred samples. Dyslexics showed the same overall pattern of phonology errors and the results were consistent across dyslexia samples, across age groups, and across experimental conditions using word and nonword homophone foils. The dyslexic groups differed from chronological-age matched controls by having elevated false-positive homophone error rates overall, and weaker effects of baseword frequency. Children with dyslexia also made more false-positive errors to spelling control foils. These findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia make use of phonology when making semantic decisions both to word homophone and non-word pseudohomophone foils and that dyslexics lack adequate knowledge of actual word spellings, compared to chronological-age and reading-level matched control participants.     

Effects of Dialect on American and British Children's Spelling

Two experiments were carried out to compare the spelling of children who speak General American English and children who speak Southern British English. The first dialect is rhotic (/r/may occur after a vowel in a syllable), and the second is nonrhotic (/r/may not occur in this context). Young children's spelling errors reflected the characteristics of their dialect. For example, American children with spelling ages of about 6–7½ often misspelled hurt as "hrt" whereas British children of similar spelling levels were more likely to misspell it as "hut." Such errors were uncommon by spelling ages of greater than 7½. Even at these spelling ages, however, the British children made overgeneralization errors that reflected their dialect. For example, they sometimes spelled bath as "barth" based on the fact that bath contains the same vowel sound as card in their dialect. The results show that phonology plays an important role in children's spelling development.