The role of invented spelling on learning to read in low-phoneme awareness kindergartners: a randomized-control-trial study

The goal of the present intervention research was to test whether guided invented spelling would facilitate entry into reading for at-risk kindergarten children. The 56 participating children had poor phoneme awareness, and as such, were at risk of having difficulty acquiring reading skills. Children were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions: invented spelling, phoneme segmentation, or storybook reading. All children participated in 16 small group sessions over 8 weeks. In addition, children in the three training conditions received letter-knowledge training and worked on the same 40 stimulus words that were created from an array of 14 letters. The findings were clear: on pretest, there were no differences between the three conditions on measures of early literacy and vocabulary, but, after training, invented spelling children learned to read more words than did the other children. As expected, the phoneme-segmentation and invented-spelling children were better on phoneme awareness than were the storybook-reading children. Most interesting, however, both the invented spelling and the phoneme-segmentation children performed similarly on phoneme awareness suggesting that the differential effect on learning to read was not due to phoneme awareness per se. As such, the findings support the view that invented spelling is an exploratory process that involves the integration of phoneme and orthographic representations. With guidance and developmentally appropriate feedback, invented spelling provides a milieu for children to explore the relation between oral language and written symbols that can facilitate their entry in reading.     

Interactions in the development of spelling,reading and phonological skills

Early interactive processes of development in reading, spelling and implicit and explicit phonological awareness were assessed in a group of children at four time-points as they progressed through their first three years in school. Exploratory causal path analyses were used to investigate the contribution of each ability to the subsequent growth of skill in reading, spelling and phonological awareness. The resultant structural models demonstrate a role of spelling in the early stages of reading acquisition, as well as differential contributions of implicit and explicit phonological awareness to both reading and spelling. They also suggest a developmental cascade from implicit to explicit phonemic awareness in the normal acquisition of phonological knowledge and associated skills. In the early formulative stages of reading implicit phonemic awareness and reading act reciprocally to build skill in each other. But, as ability in word recognition improves, implicit phonemic awareness plays a diminished role in reading. This pattern of initial reciprocal influence and later dissociation is repeated in the relationship between implicit phoneme awareness and spelling. Explicit phonemic awareness is an important factor in the first stages of spelling development but only emerges later as a significant contributor to reading. The early influence of explicit phoneme awareness on spelling, in conjunction with the major contribution of spelling to beginning reading, indicates that experience in spelling promotes the use of a phonological strategy in reading. Within a developmental context, explicit phoneme awareness initially appears to grow out of an implicit appreciation of the overall sound properties of words. Thereafter, ability to identify and segment phonemes develops independently of implicit phonemic awareness and plays an increasingly important role in the further growth of reading and spelling.     

The effects of rime‐ and phoneme‐based teaching delivered by Learning Support Assistants

This paper evaluates three word‐level teaching programmes delivered by trained Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) for Year 1 children ‘at risk’ of reading difficulties. Rime‐based, phoneme‐based, and ‘mixed’ (rime and phoneme‐based) interventions were contrasted with controls receiving only the National Literacy Strategy. Phonological onset‐rime and phoneme manipulation, spelling, and word and non‐word reading were measured before and after the nine‐week intervention. High rime neighbourhood (HRn) non‐words (e.g. ‘dat’– with many real word rime neighbours) and low rime neighbourhood (LRn) non‐words (e.g. ‘tav’ with few real word neighbours) were used to evaluate onset‐rime‐ or grapheme‐phoneme‐based decoding strategies. Results showed greater phonological onset‐rime skills, letter‐sound knowledge and non‐word reading skills in all LSA‐taught intervention groups. There was no difference between the HRn and LRn non‐words. The only reliable difference between the intervention groups was an advantage in phoneme blending for the rime‐taught group. It was concluded that LSAs can enhance literacy development for 6‐year‐old poor readers. There appears to be no simple association between rime‐ or phoneme‐based teaching intervention and changes in the size of unit used by children following interventions.     

The role of different levels of phonological awareness in the development of reading and spelling in Greek

Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of children's progress in literacy acquisition. There are different ways of segmenting words into sound sequences – syllables, phonemes, onset-rime – and little is known about whether these different levels of segmentation vary in their contribution to reading and writing. Does one of them – for example, phoneme awareness – play the major role in learning to read and spell making the other phonological units irrelevant to the prediction of reading? Or do different levels of analysis make independent contributions to reading and spelling?

Our study investigated whether syllable and phoneme awareness make independent contributions to reading and spelling in Greek. Four measures were used: syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, reading and spelling. Analyses of variance showed that Greek speaking children found it easier to analyse words into syllables than phonemes, irrespective of the influence of task variables such as position of the phonological element, word length, and placement of stress in the word. Regression analyses showed that syllable and phoneme awareness make significant and independent contributions to learning written Greek. We conclude that phonological awareness is a multidimensional phenomenon and that the different dimensions contribute to reading and writing in Greek.

     

Evaluation of a rime-based reading program with Shuswap and Heiltsuk First Nations prereaders

The utility of teaching reading using rime-based readingstrategies with prereaders was examined. Two experiments are presentedthat studied the effects of a rime-based reading program with FirstNations prereaders; one experiment with Shuswap kindergartners andthe other with Heiltsuk Grade 1 children. Rhyming, phoneme identity,letter-sound knowledge, phonological working memory, First Nationslanguage speaking ability, and reading were measured. In the Shuswapgroup, the reading program increased the abilities that werespecifically taught, rhyming, initial phoneme identity, letter-sounds,and word reading by rime-analogy, compared to the control group.Children also developed abilities that were not specifically taught,final phoneme identity and reading by letter recoding, and could use therime-analogy strategy to read words with unfamiliar rime endings.Phonological working memory remained unchanged. The Heiltsuk childrengained in reading compared to a Grade 1 comparison group. Pretestletter-sound knowledge and rhyming were related to later reading butphoneme identity and First Nations language ability were not. Progressin phonological awareness and word reading can be enhanced in prereadersby adding experience with rime-based strategies to the readingprogram.     

Language and literacy in nonvocal children with cerebral palsy

Metalinguistic and literacy abilities were studied in twenty-seven nonvocal cerebral palsied school children. The participants of the study were presented four tests of phonological awareness: rhyme recognition, sound identification, phoneme synthesis and word length analysis. Their verbal comprehension was measured using a semantic and a syntactic task. Two tests of nonverbal memory: the visual sequential task from ITPA and Corsi blocks and the Digit Span task from WISC, were also included. These measures were related to their reading and spelling ability. The nonvocal children performed on a lower level on the reading and spelling tasks than did the children of two comparison groups, one matched for mental age and one for mental and chronological age. There were no differences in phonological awareness or in verbal memory. The disabled children performed worse on the verbal comprehension task than the children in the comparison groups. Although the reading and spelling results were low in the nonvocal group there were children showing some literacy skills. A within-group analysis performed in the nonvocal group showed that the reading children performed better on all memory tests, and on the sound identification and the word length analysis tasks than the nonreading ones. They also showed better results on verbal comprehension, the semantic task and used more symbols in their communication. Synthetic speech was more often used in reading and spelling education in the reading subgroup than in the nonreading. Metalinguistic abilities and possibility of acoustic rehearsal are discussed as important factors in reading and spelling acquisition in the nonvocal population.     

An evaluation of two approaches for teaching phonemic awareness to children in Head Start

Several research studies linking early phonemic awareness to the prevention of later reading difficulties strongly suggest that phoneme segmentation and blending, rather than rhyming and alliteration abilities, are the key aspects of phonemic awareness that are related to the prevention of difficulties. Yet there is a persistent belief among many educators that instruction in rhyming and alliteration are adequate to develop phonemic awareness and developmentally more appropriate than segmentation and blending activities. Using quasi-experimental methods, I evaluated two approaches for teaching phonemic awareness to 4- and 5-year-old children in four Head Start classrooms. The first approach focused on rhymes, alliteration, and story activities. The second approach focused on phoneme segmentation and blending in the context of sounding out actual words. Results showed that children taught using the second approach produced significantly greater gains in phonemic awareness and letter–sound knowledge, compared to children using the first approach. Both approaches were more effective when teachers had previously taught attention skills to their children.     

Letter knowledge precipitates phoneme segmentation,but not phoneme invariance

There is a wealth of evidence linking letter knowledge and phoneme awareness, but there is little research examining the nature of this relationship. This article aims to elucidate this relationship by considering the links between letter knowledge and two sub‐skills of phoneme awareness: phoneme segmentation and phoneme invariance. Two studies are reported. The first study consisted of an eight‐month longitudinal study with 56 pre‐literate children. No child within this group was successful on any phoneme awareness task unless they knew at least one letter. Letter knowledge was also a significant predictor of later phoneme completion and deletion. The hypothesis that letter knowledge is an important precursor for phoneme awareness was then investigated in a small‐scale intervention study with ten children. These children were taught letters and their phoneme awareness was monitored. It was found that letter knowledge was specifically related to the development of phoneme segmentation in pre‐literate children. Possible reasons for this finding are discussed.     

The Relationship Between Phoneme Awareness and Rapid Serial Naming Skills and Literacy Acquisition: The Role of Developmental Period and Reading Ability

This study investigates the relationship between phoneme awareness and rapid naming skills and subsequent reading and spelling ability in two developmental periods: kindergarten to Grade 1 and Grade 1 to Grade 2. Two groups of children participated in the study: children at high and children at low familial risk of developmental dyslexia. The results are consistent with previous findings that both phoneme awareness and rapid naming play an important role in early literacy acquisition in an alphabetic writing system. However, relative to phoneme awareness, rapid naming plays a modest role. In this study, an unambiguous specific effect for rapid naming was found only among the children in the high-risk group. Furthermore, even among these children, the effect of rapid naming was limited to rapid naming of letters and digits and to the second developmental period investigated. The implications of these results for understanding the role played by rapid naming and phoneme awareness in alphabetic literacy acquisition are discussed.     

To what extent does children’s spelling improve as a result of learning words with the look,say, cover,write, check,fix strategy compared with phonological spelling strategies?

Abstract

The ubiquitous weekly spelling test assumes that words are best learned by memorisation and testing but is this the best way? This study compared two well-known approaches to spelling instruction, the rule based and visual memory approaches. A group of 55 seven-year-olds in two Year 3 classrooms was taught spelling in small groups for three lessons a week, 20-min per lesson, over ten weeks. In the first intervention, students learned statistically likely spelling strategies for vowel sounds, syllable breaking strategies, and the doubling rule. In the second intervention, students used a look, say, cover, write, check, fix strategy, listed words in alphabetical order, and wrote them in sentences. The control group completed non-spelling activities. Results showed that although both intervention groups learned to spell taught words better than the control group, the rule-based approach had greater transfer to spelling of new words for both proficient and less proficient spellers.     

Invented spelling: what is the best way to improve literacy skills in kindergarten?

Abstract

We examined the progress made by 132 six-year-old French-speaking children in their preliteracy skills during four kinds of interventions. Three of these interventions concerned invented spelling, where the children tried to spell words. In the first condition, they were encouraged to reflect on conventional spellings. In the second condition, they reflected on spellings that were slightly more complex than theirs, while in the third condition, they reflected on increasingly complex spellings that eventually led to the conventional spellings. The fourth condition (control) consisted of phonological training. We assessed the children’s phonological awareness, letter knowledge, spelling, and decoding skills, controlling for vocabulary and nonverbal cognitive ability. Posttest results indicated progress in each condition. The greatest progress was observed in the second condition for decoding, spelling, letter-name knowledge and syllable awareness, and in the control condition for phoneme awareness. Overall, results showed that all kinds of interventions led to very similar levels of progress, but that improvements were greater for interventions that focused on the children’s initial invented spellings - in other words, when they adopted a Vygotskian perspective.     

Accelerating the development of reading,spelling and phonemic awareness skills in initial readers

In Experiment 1, it was found that 5-year-oldnew school entrants taught by a syntheticphonics method had better reading, spelling andphonemic awareness than two groups taughtanalytic phonics. The synthetic phonicschildren were the only ones that could read byanalogy, and they also showed better reading ofirregular words and nonwords. For one analyticphonics group the programme was supplemented byphonological awareness training; this led togains in phonemic awareness but not reading orspelling compared with the other analyticphonics group. The synthetic phonics programmewas taught to the analytic phonics groups aftertheir initial programmes had been completed andpost-tested. The group that had hadphonological awareness training did not performbetter than the other two groups when tested 15months later; this was also the case when thesame comparison was made for the the subset ofchildren that had started school with weakphonological awareness skill. Speed of letterlearning was controlled for in Experiment 2; itwas found that the synthetic phonics groupstill read and spelt better than the analyticphonics group. It was concluded that syntheticphonics was more effective than analyticphonics, and that with the former approach itwas not necessary to carry out supplementarytraining in phonological awareness.     

Length awareness predicts spelling skills in Finnish

Abstract. The main type of phonemic analysis skill considered to affect spelling acquisition has been awareness of phoneme quality. However, it is also important to find out whether other measures of phoneme awareness might contribute to literacy acquisition. Thus, the influence of phoneme length and phoneme quality awareness on spelling in Finnish was compared. The Oddity task was used to assess phonemic awareness and spelling skills were investigated by a spelling-to-dictation task. The results showed that length awareness predicted spelling better than quality awareness did. Moreover, length awareness was more strongly related to spelling of long phonemes, which specifically require analysis of phoneme length, than to spelling of phoneme clusters not involving length analysis. Additionally, only length awareness predicted children's general spelling skills. These findings suggest that awareness of length, which is a phonemic attribute of the Finnish language, is connected to children's spelling skills more strongly than awareness of phoneme quality is.     

Effects of a phonological awareness program on English reading and spelling among Hong Kong Chinese ESL children

This study investigated the effects of a 12-week language-enriched phonological awareness instruction on 76 Hong Kong young children who were learning English as a second language. The children were assigned randomly to receive the instruction on phonological awareness skills embedded in vocabulary learning activities or comparison instruction which consisted of vocabulary learning and writing tasks but no direct instruction in phonological awareness skills. They were tested on receptive and expressive vocabulary, phonological awareness at the syllable, rhyme and phoneme levels, reading, and spelling in English before and after the program implementation. The results indicated that children who received the phonological awareness instruction performed significantly better than the comparison group on English word reading, spelling, phonological awareness at all levels and expressive vocabulary on the posttest when age, general intelligence and the pretest scores were controlled statistically. The findings suggest that phonological awareness instruction embedded in vocabulary learning activities might be beneficial to kindergarteners learning English as a second language.     

Predictors of early versus later spelling development in Danish

The present study examined phoneme awareness, phonological short term memory, letter knowledge, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and visual–verbal paired associate learning (PAL) as longitudinal predictors of spelling skills in an early phase (Grade 2) and a later phase (Grade 5) of development in a sample of 140 children learning to spell in the opaque Danish orthography. Important features of the study were the inclusion of PAL measures and the fact that the children were followed up to Grade 5. Findings from other orthographies were replicated, in that phonological processing (awareness and memory) and RAN accounted for unique variance in early spelling skills. For later spelling skills, Grade 2 spelling was by far the most powerful predictor. PAL-nonwords was the only measure to explain additional unique variance. It is suggested that PAL-nonwords taps the ability to establish representations of new phonological forms and that this ability is important for the acquisition of orthographic spelling knowledge.     

The contribution of morphological awareness to the spelling of morphemes and morphologically complex words in French

The goal of this study was to explore the relationship between morphological awareness and the spelling of morphemes and morphologically complex words among 75 third- and fourth-grade Francophone students of low socio-economic status. To reach this objective, we administered a dictation comprised of morphologically complex words with prefixes, bases, morphogrammes and suffixes. The target items had inconsistent or infrequent spellings, so their spelling required children to apply morphological knowledge. The children also completed three tests that measured morphological awareness. Correlational analyses indicated that a higher level of morphological awareness was significantly associated with the spelling of each type of morpheme. Regression analyses showed that it made a unique contribution only to the spelling of morphogrammes (4 %), suffixes (9 %), and morphologically complex words (5 %) after grade level, word identification, non-verbal intelligence and phonological awareness were partialled out. However, morphological awareness no longer predicted the spelling of morphologically complex words when the spelling of morphemes was entered in the regression model. These findings extending those of previous studies with respect to the role of morphological awareness in the production of morphologically complex written words and contribute to the discussion on the nature of the link between morphological awareness and word spelling.     

Metrical stress sensitivity in young children and its relationship to phonological awareness and reading

This paper reports two studies of young English‐speaking children's ability to cope with changes to the metrical stress pattern of spoken words and the relationship between this ability, phonological awareness and early reading development. Initially, 39 children aged 4 and 5 years were assessed on their ability to identify mispronounced words, including words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed. The children were significantly worse at identifying words that had their metrical stress pattern reversed than words that were mispronounced in other ways. The second study was a cross‐sectional comparison of 31 5, 6 and 7‐year‐old children's performance on the metrical stress reversal condition of the mispronunciation task. Measures of the children's written language skills and phonological awareness were also taken. The 7‐year‐old children outperformed the 5‐year‐olds on the metrical stress task. Performance on this measure was associated with most of the measures of phonological awareness and literacy, and was associated with rhyme awareness and spelling ability after age had been taken into account. Moreover, metrical stress sensitivity could account for variance in spelling ability after phonological awareness had been taken into account, and after vocabulary had been taken into account. This suggests that stress sensitivity may influence spelling development in a way that is independent of its contribution to phonological representations.     

A Window Into Early Literacy: Exploring the Cognitive and Linguistic Underpinnings of Invented Spelling

Children's early spelling attempts (invented spellings) and underlying component skills were evaluated in a sample (N = 115) of 5-year-old children. Letter-sound knowledge and phoneme awareness were shown to be important predictors of invented spelling performance in this age group. The results also showed associations between invented spelling and measures of orthographic awareness and morphological processing. The findings support the view that invented spelling is a developmentally complex and important early literacy skill that involves phonemic awareness, letter sound knowledge, and other oral language skills and orthographic knowledge.