week 8- LEARNING TO READ AND WRITE Flashcards
what is fluent reading?
- Visual processing of written word
- Memory of written word is triggered
- Phonological and semantic representations are activated
what is the Dual route to learning to read?
Baron, 1977
Orthography → Semantics (reading comprehension)
Word specific associations: =
Word parts: , have meaning in their own right
Orthography → Phonology (reading aloud)
Word-specific associations:
Correspondence rules:
Sight word reading
automatic triggering of a word’s meaning and pronunciation based on its orthographic representation, i.e. no grapheme-by-grapheme decoding necessary
what is the stroop test
name the word not the colour
The Stroop task shows how difficult it is to supress this automatic recognition of orthographic forms.
how to Test children’s automatic sight word reading
Guttentag & Haith, 1978
Children age 6;4, 6;8 + poor readers vs good readers age 9;6 + adults (control group)
Asked to name pictures as fast as they could across a range of conditions
The experimenters were testing age of automatic sight word reading
When word and picture were semantically more similar, adults were slower to respond
When word and picture were semantically more similar, good readers were slower to respond + much slower than adults overall
Poor readers = Good readers; both groups showed disruption. BUT poor readers were faster to respond to extra + intra-category words
theoretical problems with learning to read?
- Spellings are encoded in memory easily, with little practice
- Skilled readers recognise thousands of words in an instant
- Skilled readers need not have seen the written form before to recognise it
- Semantic errors are rare: synonyms such as pupil and student don’t get confused
what did Ehri find about children learning to read?
2005
• Children make connections between graphemes and sounds
• Knowledge of alphabet system forms the basis for these connections
• Knowledge of recurring spelling patterns also forms the basis for these connections
• Pattern recognition → automatic processing
Even irregular spellings have only one or two graphemes that don’t conform to established patterns. E.g. ‘sword’
When learned as sight words, irregularities can be overlooked; it is grapheme-by-grapheme decoding that would cause problems
what are Ehri’s (2005) four phases of development:
- Pre-alphabetic phase
• Early sight words
• No grapheme-sound connections established
• Select visual features are memorized .g. STOP sign
• Very limited: reflects knowledge on the world, doesn’t reflect reading ability
2. Partial alphabetic phase • Names/sounds of graphemes are learned • Bootstrap into reading first words • Often only first & final graphemes/ sounds are recognised • Difficult to decode unfamiliar words • Knowledge of consonants > vowels
- Full alphabetic phase
• Most connections formed between graphemes and sounds
• Able to segment words into grapho-phonemic chunks
• Some spellings established into memory - Consolidated phase
• Full phase readers
• Sight words retained in memory
• Grapho-phonemic connections established in larger units (e.g. syllables & morphemes)
- These four phases emerge successively BUT readers resort to previous phases when reading harder/longer words
Does seeing a written word support children’s word learning?
Ehri & Wilce, 1979
- 48 children age 6-7 years
- Presented with spoken CVC nonsense syllables + written stimulus OR no written stimulus
- Each syllable had a ‘meaning’
- Were they able to remember the nonsense syllables over an extended period?
Children were best at learning the unfamiliar words when they were exposed to the spellings
Learning to read may signify an important turning-point in linguistic development
Reading exposes children to many new words, leading to rapid vocabulary growth
It is the main source of vocabulary learning for children and adults
Which factors predict reading ability?
Cognitive ability: higher cognitive ability → better reading skills; this doesn’t tell us much on its own (hard to test)
Verbal ability: larger early vocabulary predicts better early reading abilities
Phonological memory: ability to recall longer strings of phonemes → better reading ability
Letter-name knowledge: knowing about letters/graphemes supports better reading ability
what factors may aid reading ability?
Access to pre-school: free preschool attendance supports children’s reading development
Quality of pre-school: good teaching methods and facilities → better school-readiness
SES: lower-SES linked to less developed literacy skills; single-parent families, cultural differences
Parents’ values: Endorsement of education from an early age → better reading outcomes by school
Home literacy environment: Shared reading with parents → more interest in learning to read
Comparison: English vs. Hebrew vs. Serbo-Croatian
Frost, 2005
English
• Deep orthography: more sounds than there are graphemes (don’t have one to one mapping of sound to symbol e.g. /c/, /k/, /ck/ = /k/
• Irregular system: pronunciation of yacht cannot be established from spelling alone
• Inconsistent system: moth and both have similar orthographies but different pronunciations
Hebrew
• Deep orthography: only consonants are printed, therefore high ambiguity (not all information is provided)
• When diacritics are included (representing vowels), system is completely transparent
• Inconsistent: Some consonants have two graphemes to represent them
Serbo-Croatian
• Shallow orthography: one grapheme = one sound
• Regular system
• Consistent system
what do children need to learn when learning to write?
The symbols of the writing system (i.e. abc, not 123)
The conventions of the writing system (e.g. in English: English not hsilgnE
They also need to develop sufficient motor skills to physically write
discuss a study on acquiring writing ability
Treiman et al. (2018)
179 American children, all pre-phonological spellers age 3-5;6
Analysis of written words
• Older children produced longer words than younger children
• Older children produced fewer repeated letters, but still more than occur in English
• Younger children were more likely to write letters in alphabetic order
• All children overused letters that appeared in their own names; young children overused the initial letter but not older children e.g. Fred would write F more than Dave.
• Older children produced spellings that looked more like English words
These results point to statistical learning of grapho-phonological knowledge; more experience of writing → more word-like spellings amongst pre-phonological spellers
discuss spelling and statistical learning in Brazilian Portuguese:
Treiman et al., 2019
- 313 children age 4;0-5:10
- All native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese
- Around 50% were pre-phonological spellers
- Procedure involved asking the children to write different words
Research question:
- Does the spelling of pre-phonological spellers in Portuguese map on to differences in age (i.e. do older pre-phonological spellers differ from younger spellers)?
Hypothesis:
- Learners of a transparent orthography will rely less on visual orthographic patterns, meaning there will be no clear effect of age.
Results:
- Younger children tended to be pre-phonological spellers, older children tended to be phonological spellers
- Older pre-phonological spellers produced longer spellings than younger pre-phonological spellers
- Common digrams in Portuguese occurred more often in older pre-phonological children’s spellings
- Common letters in Portuguese were more common in the children’s spellings
