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.     

Backward readers’ awareness of language: Strengths and weaknesses

An important, though somewhat neglected, aspect of learning to spell in English and in many other orthographies is that children have to learn about the conventional spellings for morphemes which often depart from strict letter-sound principles. There is some evidence that backward readers might have great difficulties with these spellings. We looked at a group of backward readers’ (BR) spelling of “ed” in regular past verbs and “wh” in interrogatives, and also at their grammatical awareness and we compared them to one control group matched on chronological age (CA) and to another matched on reading level (RL). The backward readers were considerably behind the CA controls in producing grammatically based spelling patterns correctly and also in the grammatical awareness tasks, but no worse than the RL controls in either of these domains: in fact they were better with the “wh” spellings. We conclude that learning the written language makes a significant contribution to the development of grammatical awareness and this interferes with BR progress in grammatical awareness when they are compared to their cohort. However, there is no evidence of an intrinsic difficulty with grammatical awareness among BR and perhaps this strength could be used to support their spelling.     

Learning to spell regular and irregular verbs

Several conventional spelling sequences for morphemes do not conform to letter-sound correspondence rules. One example is the -ed spelling for the inflectional morpheme at the end of English past verbs. Previous work has shown a close relationship between children's awareness of grammatical distinctions and their success in learning about this spelling sequence. However, this research was with real verbs and the children's spelling might have been influenced by familiarity with the words. To check this, we devised a task with pseudo-verbs. This is a novel use of pseudo-words, which hitherto have been a tool for testing letter-sound knowledge; here the spellings violated letter-sound relationships and followed a morphological pattern. The children heard passages with a pseudo-verb in the past tense and in other tenses and had to write the pseudo-verb in the past tense. The task contained both regular pseudo-verbs, whose stem was the same in the present and past tense, and irregular pseudo-verbs, which had different stems in the present and the past tense. The children's scores in a grammatical awareness task predicted their use of the -ed spelling sequence over a 21 month period. The children also used -ed endings significantly more often in regular than irregular pseudo-verbs. We conclude that the use of -ed endings for regular verbs reflects a morphological spelling strategy based on children's grammatical awareness.     

Quality of Prekindergarten: What Families Are Looking for in Public Sponsored Programs

This study describes the meaning of program quality for a representative group of parents of children enrolled in public prekindergarten programs. Educators often conceptualized quality in terms of structural or process indicators; parents most often cited teacher experience and relationship to children. Families, like educators, emphasized enhancing readiness as central to program quality. In addition, families identified 3 classes of indicators not usually included in educational research or professional discussions of program quality: comprehensive service provision, convenient location, and home-school collaboration. In the decision to enroll children in a program, Whites more often relied on indicators of the classroom emotional climate, Latinos more often examined the provision of comprehensive services, and African Americans more often weighed the quality of home-school partnerships than their ethnic counterparts. For Latinos living in poverty, the concern about dual language development was salient. African Americans emphasized the importance of a close relationship with staff.     

Observed classroom quality profiles in state-funded pre-kindergarten programs and associations with teacher,program, and classroom characteristics

In the past decade in the United States, pre-kindergarten programs for four year olds have expanded rapidly as a potentially powerful intervention intended to promote school readiness for children at-risk for future school failure. This paper describes in detail multi-dimensional profiles of observed quality across 692 classrooms in 11 states representing 80% of these available programs and examines teacher, program, and classroom characteristics associated in these profiles. Cluster analysis enabled the detection of patterns that fit profiles of high and low overall emotional and instructional support along with “mid-range” patterns in which emotional support is somewhat higher than instructional support. Associations between teacher characteristics and program characteristics were generally not significant. However, the poorest quality profile was associated with classroom poverty level, suggesting that the children who need the highest quality educational experiences have teachers who are struggling the most to provide it.     

The effects of learning to spell on children’s awareness of morphology

Because the spelling of many words in the English language (and in many other languages as well) depends on their morphemic structure, children have to have some knowledge about morphemes in order to learn to read and write. This raises the possibility that children gain much of their explicit knowledge about morphemes as a direct result of learning to read and to spell. We report two large-scale longitudinal studies that support the idea of this kind of causal connection. In the first study children’s success in spelling the inflexion at the end of regular past verbs predicted their performance in two morphological awareness tasks a year later. In the second study the children’s consistency in spelling morphemes predicted their ability to define new words on the basis of their morphemic structure. We conclude that the experience of learning to read and write does affect people’s knowledge of morphemes, and we argue that the causal relationship between morphemic knowledge and reading and writing is probably a two-way one.     

Assessing the gender climate of an evangelical student subculture in the United States

This study explored the gendered experiences of students belonging to an evangelical Christian religious community on a university campus in the United States. As some religious traditions harbour distinctive views on gender differences and roles, the study focused on community characteristics that pertained to beliefs about gender and the behaviours that emanated from those beliefs. The findings revealed that the community was defined by masculine norms, the endorsement of essential gender differences and separate roles for men and women with respect to leadership, modesty and dating/marriage. Suggestions for improving the conditions for women in religious groups and the broader college campus are discussed.     

Do beez buzz? Rule-based and frequency-based knowledge in learning to spell plural -s

There has been much discussion about whether certain aspects of human learning depend on the abstraction of rules or on the acquisition of frequency-based knowledge. It has usually been agreed, however, that the spelling of morphological patterns in English (e.g., past tense -ed) and other languages is based on the acquisition of morphological rules, and that these rules take a long time to learn. The regular plural -s ending seems to be an exception: Even young children can spell this correctly, even when it is pronounced /z/ (as in bees). Reported here are 3 studies that show that 5- to 9-year-old children and adults do not usually base their spellings of plural real-word and pseudo-word endings on the morphological rule that all regular plurals are spelled with -s. Instead, participants appeared to use their knowledge of complex but untaught spelling patterns, which is based on the frequency with which certain letters co-occur in written English.     

New medical library buildings. I. The Milton S. Hershey Medical Center Library of the Pennsylvania State University

This paper discusses a new medical library. The physical plant, the development of the collection, and special activities are described. The budget is presented.