Place of Environmental Print in Reading Development: Evidence From Nonliterate Adults

This study investigated the knowledge and strategies that nonliterate adults use to identify print. Participants were 20 low-socioeconomic status Brazilian adults ranging in age from 20 to 74 years. Participants' ability to identify common environmental signs displaying varying degrees of contextual information was investigated along with their ability to learn to read simplified spellings of words written to contain two types of cues, either phonetic cues linking letters to sounds or visual cues enhancing the distinctiveness of each spelling's appearance. Their ability to invent phonetic spellings was also tested. The results showed a clear dissociation between the tasks. Participants learned to read the phonetic spellings more easily than the visual spellings, indicating that they were capable of using alphabetic cues to read words. They also used their letter knowledge to spell some of the sounds in words. However, they did not use letter knowledge to read or remember words in environmental signs. They read the signs only when presented in their full context, not when printed in isolation, and they failed to notice altered letters in the signs. These results argue strongly against the hypothesis that environmental print reading provides an important foundation for learning about the alphabetic system. More likely, reading signs and labels alphabetically emerges as a result of learning to read.     

Orthographic Learning During Oral and Silent Reading

This study examined orthographic learning in oral and silent reading conditions. Dutch third graders read, either aloud or silently, short texts containing novel target (pseudo) words. The acquisition of new word-specific orthographic knowledge was assessed several days later by comparing target spellings with homophonic spellings in tasks requiring orthographic choice, spelling, and naming. It was predicted that orthographic learning would be evident in both oral and silent conditions but stronger in the oral condition. As expected, orthographic learning was evident in both oral and silent conditions. This finding suggests that support for the self-teaching hypothesis of orthographic learning obtained in studies of unassisted oral reading can be generalized to the more common form of independent reading: silent reading. In addition, the results on the naming task provided some evidence for stronger orthographic learning during oral reading, but the two spelling tasks did not.     

Beginning Reading by Teaching in Rime Analogy: Effects on Phonological Skills,Letter-Sound Knowledge,Working Memory,and Word-Reading Strategies

Prereading kindergartners were assigned to groups that varied experience with (a) the rime analogy reading strategy; (b) the implicated prereading skills of rhyming, initial phoneme identity, and letter-sounds; or (c) a control group. Teaching in the rime analogy strategy and the prereading skills resulted in more reading than teaching in the rime analogy strategy or prereading skills alone. Many children developed the untaught abilities of medial and final phoneme identity and the letter recoding reading strategy. Children with high prereading skill levels read the most words, and the use of specific prereading skills varied across different reading word types. Working memory was unrelated to increases in prereading skills or reading. Children were able to generalize the rime analogy strategy to read words with unfamiliar rime spellings.     

Effects of two types of letter rehearsal on word memory in skilled and less skilled beginning readers

Skilled and less skilled beginning readers were taught to read and define 10 printed pseudowords. Then they rehearsed the spellings of the words in one of two ways. Experimental subjects performed activities to retain spellings in memory as orthographic images. Control subjects rehearsed the letters similarly but with the correct spellings in view. Post-tests revealed that experimentals remembered spellings better than controls. This indicates that the activity of committing letters to memory is better for learning spellings than copying letters which is what most spelling programs have learners do. Experimental subjects' superior knowledge of spellings, however, did not enable them to read the words faster or more accurately than controls, possibly because of overlearning. Comparison of good and poor readers' word-learning behavior revealed greater deficiencies in phonological than in semantic processes. Correlational analysis indicated that background skills are much more powerful than specific learning experiences in accounting for individual differences in reading and spelling performances.     

不同英语认读教法对儿童词汇认读能力的影响

本研究通过三种不同英语认读教法,对早期半浸入式双语教育环境下64名儿童的英、汉两种语言词汇认读能力进行考察。结果表明,不同英语认读教法对双语儿童两种语言的词汇认读产生了不同影响:在字母拼读教学条件下,儿童英语词汇认读水平显著高于音标认读与整词认读条件;在整词认读教学条件下,儿童汉语词汇认读水平显著高于字母拼读与音标认读条件;在传统音标教学条件下,儿童两种语言词汇认读水平均最低,表明音标教学不利于儿童的英语词汇认读能力的提高,而且可能对儿童母语认读水平造成不利影响。     

Alphabetic access route in beginning reading acquisition in Portuguese: The role of letter-name knowledge

The present study investigates Ehri's (Ehri & Wilce 1985; Scott & Ehri 1990) hypothesis that knowledge of the alphabet enables children to learn to read by processing and storing letter-sound relations in words. In particular, it examines whether letter-name knowledge facilitates the learning of spellings in which the names of one or more letters can be heard in the pronunciation of the words. Preschool children who could not read any word out of context were divided into two groups on the basis of their ability to name the letters of the alphabet: one group knew the names of the letters while the other did not. Both groups were taught to read two types of simplified spellings: visual spellings, that is, spellings whose letters did not correspond to sounds in the pronunciations of the words but which were visually more salient (e.g., X_QKO for the word cerveja), and phonetic spellings, that is, spellings whose letters corresponded to sounds in the pronunciation of the words (e.g., CRVA for the word cerveja). In all phonetic spellings, the name of at least one letter could be clearly heard in the pronunciation of the words. Results corroborated Ehri's hypothesis. The children who did not know the names of the letters learned to read the visual spellings more easily than the phonetic ones. On the other hand, the children who knew the names of the letters showed the opposite pattern, that is, they learned the phonetic spellings more easily than the visual ones.     

Language Impairment at School Entry and Later Reading Disability: Connections at Lexical Versus Supralexical Levels of Reading

This study employed the distinction between lexical and supralexical processes in reading in order to gain a more fine-grained picture of the relationships between early language impairment and later reading disabilities. We hypothesized that early semantic-syntactic deficits would be only weakly related, if at all, to the characteristically modular word recognition processes involved in reading isolated words and pseudowords. On the other hand, early language deficiencies were expected to be significantly associated with processes operating beyond the level of individual words when children are required to read and understand connected text. These predictions were tested using data from a longitudinal study of over 500 unselected children followed from kindergarten to the end of Grade 1. Both traditional categorical analyses of specific subgroups with early language impairment or later reading disability as well as dimensional (regression) analyses were carried out. As predicted, higher order language was found to be related to supralexical aspects of reading after controlling IQ, age, gender and socioeconomic status, with only a weak and statistically marginal association with lexical processing. With biosocial variables and phonological awareness partialled out, higher order language was unrelated to lexical aspects of reading. These data highlight the multicomponential nature of reading and suggest that different measures of reading cannot simply be regarded as interchangeable measures of a single undifferentiated reading construct.     

Letter name knowledge and the ability to learn to read by processing letter–phoneme relations in words: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Previous studies [Scott & Ehri (1990) Journal of Reading Behavior22: 149–166; de Abreu & Cardoso-Martins (1998) Reading and Writing:An Interdisciplinary Journal 10: 85–104] have shown thatprereaders who know the names of the lettersuse a visual–phonological strategy to learn toread words in which the names of one or moreletters can be clearly detected in thepronunciation of the words. The present resultsextend these findings by showing that BrazilianPortuguese-speaking prereaders who know thenames of the letters can process letter–soundrelations to learn to read spellings in whichthe letters correspond to phonemes, not toletter names. Following Ehri & Wilce'sprocedure [(1985) Reading Research Quarterly 20:163–179], Brazilian preschool childrenlearned to read two types of simplifiedspellings: phonetic spellings, that is,spellings in which the letters corresponded tophonemes in the pronunciation of the words(e.g., SPT for sapato), and visualspellings, that is, spellings in which theletters did not correspond to sounds in thepronunciation of the words, but which werevisually more salient (e.g., VST for pijama). The children learned to read thephonetic spellings more easily than the visualspellings, suggesting that they recognized theletter–phoneme relations in learning to readthe phonetic spellings. This interpretation isbolstered by the results of correlationalanalyses between knowledge of letter sounds andperformance on the two word-learning tasks.While knowledge of letter–phonemecorrespondences did not correlate withperformance on the word-learning task with thevisual spellings, it correlated significantlyand positively with the children's ability tolearn to read the phonetic spellings.     

The IMPACT Project: Parental involvement in the Curriculum*

This account of a curriculum‐based parental involvement scheme, the IMPACT Project, will attempt to describe some of the early findings within a theoretical context. The IMPACT Project was started in 1985 as an attempt to mirror the very successful work in shared reading initiatives between family and school in the area of mathematics. The late 1970's and early 80's had seen the establishment of a substantial body of evidence, gleaned from both research and practice, of the efficacy of involving parents in their children's learning to read through a programme of regular reading at home and sustained dialogue between teacher and parent about the child's progress (Topping & Wolfendale, 1985, Hamilton & Griffiths, 1984). The mechanisms by which this dialogue was maintained usually included small ‘reading diaries’ completed by parents and children at home and, responsively, by the teacher in class. For many of us working in the area of mathematics at that time, it seemed likely that the gains in terms of children's performance in, and attitude to, reading through the simple expedient of involving their parents in a sustained programme of tasks done at home would be replicated were the model to be applied in mathematics. I was concerned that because most parents perceive mathematics as harder ‐ ‘a byword for bewilderment and boredom’ as one national British periodical described mathematics (Time Out Magazine, 1984) ‐perhaps the response rate would be lower than it was for the shared reading. This turned out to be entirely unfounded. In fact, the response rates on IMPACT prove to be on average substantially higher than those for the shared reading.     

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.     

Guided reading: young pupils' perspectives on classroom practice

Guided reading is widely perceived to be tricky in English primary schools; prior research has found difficulties with teacher interpretation and implementation. The study reported here suggests that to understand the problems associated with it we should also take into account pupils' perspectives on their guided reading lessons. In this case, the pupils were 4–7 years old. The special challenges of accessing young pupil perspectives were addressed through co‐authored drawings, a type of graphic elicitation. The drawings, together with other collected data, generated insights into pupil perceptions of literacy practices, of the role of friends and ability grouping in learning to read, and of their teachers' organisational challenges. A socio‐cultural analysis of these data indicates that these pupils were sensitive to the social and cultural contexts of their guided reading lessons. It may be that precise official advice for guided reading in England, originating in the National Literacy Strategy documents in 1999 and the Primary National Strategy documents in 2003 and 2008, has been insufficiently sensitive to the complex teaching and learning contexts of guided reading and that this discrepancy has contributed to the identified difficulties. The paper concludes that some rethinking of the literacy practice of guided reading would be valuable.     

Rhyme Awareness,Orthographic Analogy Use,Phonemic Awareness and Reading: An examination of relationships

It is suggested that children learning to read require phonemic awareness before being able to make orthographic analogies during reading (Ehri & Robbins, 1992) and that phonemic awareness is a better discriminator of children who will benefit from orthographic analogies than rhyme awareness (Walton, 1995). It has also been found that orthographic analogy use does not make an independent contribution to early reading ability (Wood, 1999). The present study investigates which skills are best able to account for orthographic analogy use during early reading and tests the finding that there is no independent association between reading ability and orthographic analogy use. Results suggest that phonemic awareness and reading experience are best able to account for analogy use, and that orthographic analogy use does directly contribute to early reading ability. Rhyme awareness was also associated with orthographic analogy use, but this contribution was less than that of phonemic awareness, and was not significant after the contribution of phonemic awareness was taken into account.     

Effects of variations in orthographic information on Asian and American readers' English text reading

Orthographies vary in the support they provide for word identification based on grapheme-phoneme correspondences. If skills developed in acquisition of first-language (L1) reading transfer to reading English as a foreign language (EFL), the extent to which EFL readers' word identification shows reliance on information other than grapheme-phoneme correspondences could be expected to vary with whether their L1 orthography is a non-Roman alphabet such as Korean hangul or a nonalphabetic (morpho-syllabic) system such as Chinese characters. Another influence could be whether EFL readers have learned to read a morpho-syllabic L1 by means of an alphabetic transliteration. English text reading speeds and oral reading quality ratings of three groups of adult Asian EFL readers attending an American university were compared with those of two groups of American L1 readers: Graduate student peers and eighth-grade students. All EFL groups read more slowly than both groups of L1 readers, and their reading was more impaired when orthographic cues were disrupted by mixed case print or pseudohomophone spellings. Some of these effects were reduced in EFL readers from Hong Kong, who had earlier exposure to English. Contrary to previous findings, no effects could be attributed to type of first orthography or early exposure to alphabetic transliteration of Chinese characters, which differentiated the Taiwanese and Hong Kong groups. As a whole, the results suggest that, at least across the L1 groups studied, differences in EFL word reading are associated less with type of L1 orthography than with history of exposure to English.     

Spelling transparency and its impact on dyslexic and unimpaired children’s memory for words

The phonologically transparent Persian orthography is normally transcribed with two distinct spellings; words spelled with vowels (letters) transcribed as a fixed part of the spelling (transparent) and words spelled with vowels (diacritics) omitted (opaque). Three groups of Persian readers, namely developmental dyslexics (n=29, mean age=9.4, SD=1.4), unimpaired readers matched on age (n=49, mean age=9, SD=1.3), and reading age (n=23, mean age=7.2, SD=0.4) with the dyslexics performed on a short-term memory verbal test. The time taken to read aloud lists of words with opaque and transparent spellings, the errors made on reading the words in each list, and the number of correctly recalled words in each list was subjected to statistical analysis. The results showed that transparent words as a whole were read more accurately than opaque words. However, recall of words was best for opaque words for the older group of unimpaired readers compared to the transparent words, while the opposite was true for dyslexics and unimpaired reading age matched participants. The implications of these results are discussed.     

浅谈英语阅读能力的培养

英语阅读能力的培养非常重要.在英语教学过程中,应着眼于学生阅读能力的提高,把握好音、形、义等几个方面在阅读中的关系,并根据英语语法结构与句型相互转换的特点,加强阅读过程中的逻辑判断能力培养,改进基础训练方法.     

The effect of the method of repeated readings on the reading rate and word recognition accuracy of deaf adolescents

This study examined the effects of the method of repeated readings (RR), a well-accepted remedial reading technique for improving the reading rate of hearing children, with deaf adolescents. Forty-two students from a midwestern residential school for the deaf were randomly assigned into treatment and control groups. The groups were equivalent with respect to age, level of hearing loss, reading achievement, and mental ability. All subjects read material previously determined to be at their instructional levels. Members of the treatment group were videotaped during the initial reading of an assigned passage, allowed to practice over three 15-minute sessions, then videotaped again during a final reading of the assigned passage. The control group differed only in that it practiced reading material other than the assigned passage. Reading rates and word recognition accuracy were recorded for the initial and final reading of each of five passages. Results indicated that the treatment subjects demonstrated significant improvement between pre- and posttesting regarding reading rate and two measures of word recognition accuracy. The performance of subjects engaged in nonrepetitive reading demonstrated minimal improvement. We discuss applicability of this procedure with a deaf population and implications for future research and practice.     

A path analytic model linking foundational skills to Grade 3 state reading achievement

Considerable evidence supports that close to two thirds of all fourth-grade students read at less than adequate levels on reading achievement tests and that the problem has persisted for decades. This study of 1,064 third-grade students at risk for reading failure uses path analytic techniques to measure a hypothesized model linking developmental spelling, sight- and pseudo-word reading, and reading fluency to achievement on an end-of-year state reading test. While all hypothesized paths were found to be significant, paths not hypothesized were also significant. These paths included direct effects for spelling development on fluency and reading achievement, as well as the direct effect of sight-word reading on state reading achievement. In total, the model predicted 41.9% of the variance in state reading achievement and found that students proficient at foundational reading skills were 7 times more likely to be proficient on the state reading achievement assessment.     

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.     

Knowledge of the alphabet and explicit awareness of phonemes in pre-readers: The nature of the relationship

This study was carried out to examine the extent to which preschool children are aware of the phonemic structure of the spoken word and to investigate how they acquire that knowledge. The four year old non-readers carried out a battery of takss designed to assess product name reading ability, knowledge of the alphabet, rhyme skills and explicit phonemic awareness ability. There was evidence that they generally acquired knowledge of the alphabet before they showed explicit phonemic awareness ability. Fixed order regression analyses showed that ability to read and write the alphabet generally accounted for unique variance in phoneme awareness and product name reading ability over and above that accounted for by rhyme skills but that rhyme ability accounted for no unique variance beyond that accounted for by alphabet knowledge. Further analyses showed that alphabet knowledge also contributed unique variance to product name reading ability over and above that accounted for by phonemic awareness ability but that the reverse was not the case. It was hypothesised that many preschool non-readers may start to gain an insight into the phonemic structure of the spoken word by becoming aware of the connection between the sounds of letters in environmental print and the sounds of the spoken word.     

Extending research on the interspersal procedure to perceptions of continuous reading assignments: Applied and theoretical implications of a failure to replicate

Researchers have shown that students' perceptions of mathematics assignments could be improved by interspersing additional briefer, easier problems (e.g., Logan and Skinner, 1998). The current study was designed to extend this research to reading tasks. Seventh‐grade students read out loud both a control passage and a similar experimental passage that contained additional interspersed brief (i.e., 16 words), easy (i.e., first‐grade reading level) paragraphs. Students then selected the passage that would require the least effort to read and the least time to read. Students also indicated the passage they liked most (preference) and the passage that they would like to read again (choice). Significantly more students selected the control passage as requiring less time to read, but no differences were found for preference, choice, or effort selections. The results failed to confirm earlier research on the interspersal procedure, thus our findings have applied and theoretical implications regarding causal variables that may account for the effectiveness of the interspersal procedure. Specifically, the current study suggests that the interspersal procedure may improve assignment perception only when the procedure increases discrete task‐completion rates. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.