(1) Department of Special Education and Reading, Southern Connecticut State University, 501 Crescent Street, 06515 New Haven, CT
Abstract:
This study examined the word-structure knowledge of novice teachers and the progress of children tutored by a subgroup of
the teachers. Teachers’ word-structure knowledge was assessed using three tasks: graphophonemic segmentation, classification
of pseudowords by syllable type, and classification of real words as phonetically regular or irregular. Tutored children were
assessed on several measures of basic reading and spelling skills. Novice teachers who received word-structure instruction
outperformed a comparison group of teachers in word-structure knowledge at post-test. Tutored children improved significantly
from pre-test to post-test on all assessments. Teachers’ post-test knowledge on the graphophonemic segmentation and irregular
words tasks correlated significantly with tutored children’s progress in decoding phonetically regular words; error analyses
indicated links between teachers’ patterns of word-structure knowledge and children’s patterns of decoding progress. The study
suggests that word-structure knowledge is important to effective teaching of word decoding and underscores the need to include
this information in teacher preparation.