Learning vocabulary through e-book reading of young children with various reading abilities

Previous studies revealed that young children learn novel word meanings by simply reading and listening to a printed book. In today’s classroom, many children’s e-books provide audio narration support so young readers can simply listen to the e-books. The focus of the present study is to examine the effect of e-book reading with audio narration support on the novel vocabulary learning of first grade students with advanced, average, and poor reading abilities. The effect of adding teacher’s word explanation on novel word learning was also examined. By employing a within-subject design, students read an e-book that contained ten explained words and another e-book containing ten unexplained words. Their performances were compared to ten unexposed control words. As a whole group, results indicated that teacher’s word explanation resulted in greater word learning compared to when word explanation was not provided. However, e-book reading conditions without teacher’s word explanation did not lead to incidental word learning from the e-book context compared to the unexposed control words. When the students were divided into subgroups based on their reading abilities, readers with higher reading abilities learned more word meanings from e-book with teacher’s word explanation. However, three subgroups of readers showed different patterns of word learning across the e-book with and without word explanation and the control conditions. Educational implications of using e-books for students with different reading abilities and limitations are discussed.     

Effects of individualized word retrieval in kindergarten vocabulary intervention

We examined the effects of adaptive word retrieval intervention on a classroom vocabulary program on children’s vocabulary acquisition in kindergarten. In the experimental condition, word retrieval was provided in a classroom vocabulary program, combining implicit and explicit vocabulary instructions. Children performed extra word retrieval activities and received semantic feedback for words they did not learn during the classroom vocabulary program. Eighty-seven children were in the experimental condition, and 115 children were in the classroom vocabulary control condition. Results showed the adaptive word retrieval intervention to stimulate higher learning gains than the classroom vocabulary program on the learning of the target words. Children in the experimental condition also showed transfer effects; they described more words on a standardized expressive vocabulary test than children in the control condition. The research findings suggest additional value of word retrieval with feedback for classroom vocabulary learning.     

Spatial Metaphor Facilitates Word Learning

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of “high” to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more proficient at learning the word when it described a spatial attribute compared to pitch. However, once children learned the word, they extended it to the untrained dimension without feedback. Thus, children leveraged preexisting associations between space and pitch to spontaneously understand new metaphors. These results suggest that spatial metaphors may be common across languages in part because they scaffold children’s acquisition of word meanings that are otherwise difficult to learn.     

Optimizing Word Learning via Links to Perceptual and Motoric Experience

The aim of this review is to consider how current vocabulary training methods could be optimized by considering recent scientific insights in how the brain represents conceptual knowledge. We outline the findings from several methods of vocabulary training. In each case, we consider how taking an embodied cognition perspective could impact word learning. The evidence we review suggests that vocabulary training methods can be optimized by making a congruent link between the words to learn and one’s own perceptual and motoric experiences. In particular, we suggest that motoric information about the meaning of a word could be incorporated into more standard vocabulary training methods. Finally, we consider the impact an embodied cognitive perspective may have on other characteristics of word learning, such as individual differences in learning and variations in learning different types of words, for example words from different word classes and words in different contexts.     

Development and Prediction of Context-Dependent Vowel Pronunciation in Elementary Readers

ABSTRACT

As children learn to read, they become sensitive to context-dependent vowel pronunciations in words, considered a form of statistical learning. The work of Treiman and colleagues demonstrated that readers’ vowel pronunciations depend on the consonantal context in which the vowel occurs and reading experience. Using explanatory item-response models we examined child- and nonword-factors associated with children’s assignment of more versus less frequent grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPC) to vowel pronunciations as a function of rime coda in monosyllabic nonwords. Students (N = 96) in grades 2-5 read nonwords in which more versus less frequent vowel GPCs were wholly supported or partially favored by the rime unit. Use of less frequent vowel GPCs was predicted by set for variability, word reading, and rime support for the context-dependent vowel pronunciation. We interpret the results within a developmental word reading model in which initially incomplete and oversimplified GPC representations become more context dependent with reading experience.     

Predicting word-spelling difficulty in 7- to 11-year-olds

Some languages have simple grapheme-phoneme codes in which there is a one-to-one mapping, making them easy to teach and learn, while others have more complicated structures and are more difficult for teachers and students. There is now an increasing number of studies which demonstrate that readers in more transparent orthographies such as Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Greek and German have little difficulty in decoding written words, while English children have many more problems. Increasingly, lack of orthographic transparency in English is seen as having a powerful negative effect on the development of literacy skills in English-speaking children. In the present study, the word factors associated with poor spelling in 5 school year-groups (ages 7 to 11 years) are identified as: (a) frequency of the word in the English language, (b) length of the word and (c) a measure of the phoneticity of the word. The concept of word phoneticity is explored and data is presented illustrating the predictive model of spelling. The implications the model has for teaching and learning English are discussed, with particular reference to the beneficial effects that greater orthographic transparency would have for children.     

Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers?

We report two training studies designed to investigate the relation between phonological awareness, sound‐to‐letter mapping knowledge, and printed word learning in novice five‐year‐old readers. Effects of visual memory and of teaching methods are also explored. In our first study, novice five‐year‐old readers able to segment initial phonemes and with good knowledge of mappings between sounds and letters learned words more easily from repeated exposure to texts. Results suggested that visual memory influenced word learning in non‐segmenting but not in segmenting children. Spelling regularity did not affect ease of learning. Nouns were easier to learn than function words. In the second study, although phonological awareness and sound‐to‐letter mapping knowledge still exerted a significant influence, all novice five‐year‐olds were able to learn words more easily if these were taught out‐of‐context singly on flashcards. Results support the view that mental representations of printed words are more easily formed by beginners who are able to match at least some of the phonological segments detected in the spoken word to letters in the printed word.     

Does teaching children about human rights,encourage them to practice,protect and promote the rights of others?

The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Rights Respecting Schools Award makes positive contributions to children’s lives and experiences at school. Within the overall context of education as a right, the Award supports children to learn about their rights and the rights of others. By learning through a rights-based framework, children experience a rights-based approach to education and start to become active rights thinkers and rights holders. This article presents findings regarding the lived experiences of children participating in a rights education programme from a primary school in England. The results are consistent with previous rights education research and confirm that teaching and supporting the human rights of children to children, through a rights education programme, encourages children to practice, protect and promote the rights of others within their school.     

What starts to happen to assessment when teachers learn about their children’s informal learning?

Classroom assessment practices are greatly influenced by national and local policies on assessment. Typically, these include accountability requirements for schools to evidence and report their students’ learning in the form of specific learning outcomes, calibrated against national benchmark standards of achievement and progression. An implication for teachers is that their understanding of children’s learning is influenced by an official curriculum that is more likely to be weighted towards particular policy priorities, and desired learning outcomes. This means the knowledge, skills and understanding that children develop outside school are less likely to be included in classroom assessment measures or judgments about desirable progress and achievement. This article explores what happens to teachers’ thinking when they learn about their children’s informal learning outside school and begin to relate to learners in a different way. The findings reported here from a New Zealand three-year longitudinal study identified possibilities for teachers to assess expanded conceptions of children’s learning within the classroom, even though the pressures of assessment against National Standards were ever present. We argue that teachers engaging with knowledge of their students’ informal learning act as a catalyst to rethink and re-conceptualise learning more broadly. Incorporating a strong student voice component in assessment, together with a focus on ipsative assessment, enables teachers to mitigate some of the unintended educational consequences of assessment accountability policies and practices.     

Phonological and Semantic Knowledge Are Causal Influences on Learning to Read Words in Chinese

We report a training study that assesses whether teaching the pronunciation and meaning of spoken words improves Chinese children’s subsequent attempts to learn to read the words. Teaching the pronunciations of words helps children to learn to read those same words, and teaching the pronunciations and meanings improves learning still further. These results provide evidence that both phonological and semantic knowledge are causal influences on learning to read words aloud in Chinese. It appears that learning to read words in Chinese may entail a greater reliance on mappings from orthography to semantics than learning to read words in alphabetic orthographies.     

Conversations Around Young Children’s Drawing: The Impact of the Beliefs of Significant Others at Home and School

Children learn to make meanings in communities of practice through interaction with more experienced others. Young children’s strategies for and attitudes to learning are determined by the sociocultural contexts in which they practise those strategies, including learning how to draw within the distinct cultures of home and school. Evidence of meaning making — 2 and 3D representations involving drawing, modelling and play with objects — was collected over one month periods in the Autumns of 98, 99 and 00 from seven young children in home and as they settled into new pre–school and school settings in the North of England. The evidence of the seven children’s meaning making, recorded by photographs and scrap books of their representations, was used as a stimulus in dialogues to elicit parents’ and practitioners’ beliefs about the value and significance of different modes meaning making, including drawing in the contexts of home and school. Their conversations were recorded and transcribed for analysis. Evidence from the perspectives of parents, practitioners and the children was triangulated with evidence of contextual features for learning around the children’s drawings. Episodes from analysis of the data sets will be used to illustrate how the children were inducted into the conventions of ‘school’ drawing whilst often retaining a distinct personal drawing agenda at home. Implications will be drawn for the status and function of drawing in the education of young children in formal and informal learning contexts.     

Variability in children’s early reading strategies

The present study examines the development of sight word reading in young children by examining changes in their self‐reported reading strategies over time. A sample of 65 five to seven year olds were asked to read 40 real word items, all carefully matched for letter length and word frequency, on three separate occasions. Changes in the children’s word identifications were measured using immediately retrospective verbal self‐reports. Overall, the results showed some variability in the children’s self‐reported reading strategies. Over time the children relied less on phonological strategies and moved towards reliance on directly retrieving words from memory. This change was most evident in the older children; while both year groups showed similar patterns of shifting reliance from explicit phonological strategies to retrieval, this shift was simply less frequent among the younger children. An analysis of word‐specific changes in reading strategies showed that the older children had a better sight vocabulary for more complex word items. These findings provide further support for Ehri’s mediated phase theory in explaining children’s development in learning to read.     

Questions Can Answer Questions About Mechanisms of Preschoolers’ Selective Word Learning

This study examined how inferences about epistemic competence and generalized labeling errors influence children’s selective word learning. Three- to 4-year-olds (N = 128) learned words from informants who asked questions about objects, mentioning either correct or incorrect labels. Such questions do not convey stark differences in informants’ epistemic competence. Inaccurate labels, however, generate error signals that can lead to weaker encoding of novel information. Preschoolers retained novel labels from both informants but were slower to respond in the Inaccurate Labeler condition. When the test procedure was not sensitive to the strength of information encoding, children performed above chance in both conditions and their response times did not differ. These results suggest that epistemic-level inferences and error generalizations influence preschoolers’ selective word learning concurrently.     

儿童早期学习品质的本质内涵、因素结构及学习效应

近年来儿童早期学习品质受到国内外学术界的广泛关注。对61个国内外实证研究及25份新修订政策文本的分析表明,学界对儿童学习品质最基本的理解是学习品质关注的是儿童如何学习,而不是儿童学到了什么,描述的是儿童在趋近学习的过程中和投入学习时表现出来的一系列行为、认知与态度倾向;就其构成因素来说,主动性、坚持性、专注力、好奇心、创新创造、灵活性是实证研究与政策文件共同反映的高频因素;学习品质与儿童的在园学习与入学准备显著相关,且能直接预测儿童未来不同阶段的学业成就;学习品质对儿童的同伴关系、社会能力的发展也有显著影响,并能显著降低行为问题与学业困难方面的风险;学习品质在儿童的学习与发展中起着重要的调节作用,如可以调节低质量学校教育或家庭贫困对儿童学习与发展的负面影响,可以降低个体行为问题对其学业成就的不利影响等。学习品质在儿童早期学习与毕生发展中都具有重要的奠基性作用,未来应进一步探索更为低龄儿童学习品质的因素结构及其发展规律,加强我国教育背景下学习品质对儿童学习效应的实证检验与纵向追踪,探索学习品质发展的个体差异及其增长轨迹,开展相关准实验研究以进一步明确学习品质与学习效应之间的关系。不仅要促进我国儿童早期教育实践领域高度重视和践行儿童学习品质的培养,而且应在宏观政策层面把儿童学习品质的发展纳入学前教育质量评价体系,建立儿童学习品质发展数据库,实施儿童学习品质发展监测。     

Using Theory of Mind to Promote Conceptual Change in Science

We argue that learning science requires children to move from perceptually based representations to more abstract conceptual representations and to understand that appearance may sometimes deceive us and that the same phenomenon in the world can have more than one representation when seen from different perspectives. We also argue that the beginnings of such an epistemological perspective can be found in young children’s ability to think about the difference between their beliefs and the beliefs of others in the social domain, i.e., their Theory of Mind. We present the results of two empirical studies that show significant correlations between children’s growing Theory of Mind, developing epistemological thinking, and science learning, and suggest that Theory of Mind tasks can be used to promote conceptual change in science.     

Nature of Interactions Among Young Children and Adult Caregivers in a Children’s Museum

This naturalistic, qualitative study examines the nature of child- and adult-led interactions in a children’s museum. Using dialogic learning as a theoretical framework, the study examines how children and adults engage in interactions while learning at a museum. Findings suggest that children and adults are almost equally likely to lead interactions; however, most child-led interactions are qualitatively different from adult-led interactions. Children are more likely to show-and-tell about their experiences and learn by asking questions and commenting about their play. Adults are more likely to teach by telling, prompting, and reporting a child’s activities. Children and adults also are equally engage in pretend play during their interactions. Leveraging these findings, recommendations are made for museum exhibit space design.     

Factors affecting the motivation to learn among United Arab Emirates middle and high school students

This study was designed to examine the relative contributions of student and parents’ socio‐demographics, students’ beliefs about learning, parental support of children’s learning, peers’ attitudes towards learning, teacher–student interaction and curriculum content to students’ motivation to learn. The sample consisted of 275 school‐age children ranging from 12 to 16 years old. All measures were constructed for the purpose of this study. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to predict student motivation to learn. Results indicated that students’ beliefs about learning, teacher–student interaction and curriculum content contributed to the United Arab Emirates middle and high school students’ motivation to learn. Implications for research are discussed.     

Breaking the language barrier: an emergentist coalition model for the origins of word learning

How do children learn their first words? The field of language development has been polarized by responses to this question. Explanations range from constraints/principles accounts that emphasize the importance of cognitive heuristics in language acquisition, to social-pragmatic accounts that highlight the role of parent-child interaction, to associationistic accounts that highlight the role of "dumb attentional mechanisms" in word learning. In this Monograph, an alternative to these accounts is presented: the emergentist coalition theory. A hybrid view of word learning, this theory characterizes lexical acquisition as the emergent product of multiple factors, including cognitive constraints, social-pragmatic factors, and global attentional mechanisms. The model makes three assumptions: (a) that children cull from multiple inputs available for word learning at any given time, (b) that these inputs are differentially weighted over development, and (c) that children develop emergent principles of word learning, which guide subsequent word acquisition. With few exceptions, competing accounts of the word learning process have examined children who are already veteran word learners. By focusing on the very beginnings of word learning at around 12 months of age, however, it is possible to see how social and cognitive factors are coordinated in the process of vocabulary development. After presenting a new method for investigating word learning, the development of reference is used as a test case of the theory. In 12 experiments, with children ranging in age from 12 to 25 months of age, data are described that support the emergentist coalition model. This fundamentally developmental theory posits that children construct principles of word learning. As children's word learning principles emerge and develop, the character of word learning changes over the course of the 2nd year of life.     

The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning

Nearly every recent account of children's word learning has addressed the claim that children are biased to construct mutually exclusive extensions, that is, that they are disposed to keep the set of referents of one word from overlapping with those of others. Three basic positions have been taken--that children have the bias when they first start to learn words, that they never have it, and that they acquire it during early childhood. A review of diary and test evidence as well as the results of four experiments provide strong support for this last view and indicate that the bias develops in the months following the second birthday but does not gain full strength or become accessible to consciousness until sometime after the third birthday. Several studies also show that, after this point, it can still be counteracted by information in input or by a strong belief that something belongs to the extension of a particular word. The full body of evidence is compatible with the view that mutual exclusivity is the default option in children's and adults' procedures for integrating the extensions of new and old words. We present several arguments for the adaptive value of this kind of bias.     

The Role of Orthographic and Semantic Learning in Word Reading and Reading Comprehension

We tested the theoretically driven hypotheses that children’s orthographic and semantic learning are associated with their word reading and reading comprehension skills, even when orthographic and semantic knowledge are taken into account. A sample of 139 English-speaking Grade 3 children completed a learning task in which they read stories about new inventions. Then they were tested on their learning of the spelling and meaning of the inventions (i.e., orthographic and semantic learning, respectively). Word reading and reading comprehension were assessed with standardised tasks, and orthographic and semantic knowledge were assessed with choice tasks targeting the spelling and meaning of existing words. The results of our structural equation modeling indicated that orthographic learning predicted word reading directly and reading comprehension indirectly via word reading. We also found that semantic learning predicted reading comprehension directly. These findings support integration of the self-teaching hypothesis and the lexical quality hypothesis.