The effects of an adapted interactive writing intervention on kindergarten children's phonological awareness, spelling, and early reading development: A contextualized approach to instruction.

Using a pretest-posttest comparison-group design, this 16-week study investigated the effects of 2 instructional approaches on the phonological awareness, alphabetic knowledge, and early reading of kindergarten children. The primary goal was to compare a form of contextualized instruction based on an adapted interactive writing program with a field-tested program of metalinguistic games. For instructional purposes, the children in each treatment group were divided into small intervention classes, with groupings based on children's common strengths and needs. Each week, these classes met with trained literacy tutors for 4 20-min lessons. Pretest and posttest measures provided data on children's phonological awareness, spelling, and reading development. Statistical analyses of the data indicated no between-groups differences with regard to phonological awareness and spelling achievement. In contrast, results revealed statistically significant differences between the 2 groups on word identification, passage comprehension, and word reading development measures, with the adapted interactive writing group demonstrating greater achievement. These findings verify that the children participating in a contextualized program matched or exceeded the achievement of the children participating in a structured program of metalinguistic games. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Development of Reading in Children Who Speak English as a Second Language.

Patterns of reading development were examined in native English-speaking (L1) children and children who spoke English as a second language (ESL). Participants were 978 (790 L1 speakers and 188 ESL speakers) Grade 2 children involved in a longitudinal study that began in kindergarten. In kindergarten and Grade 2, participants completed standardized and experimental measures including reading, spelling, phonological processing, and memory. All children received phonological awareness instruction in kindergarten and phonics instruction in Grade 1. By the end of Grade 2, the ESL speakers' reading skills were comparable to those of L1 speakers, and ESL speakers even outperformed L1 speakers on several measures. The findings demonstrate that a model of early identification and intervention for children at risk is beneficial for ESL speakers and also suggest that the effects of bilingualism on the acquisition of early reading skills are not negative and may be positive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Specific contributions of phonological abilities to early reading acquisition: Results from a Dutch latent variable longitudinal study.

Contributions of phonological abilities to early reading acquisition were examined in a longitudinal study of 166 Dutch children from kindergarten through 2nd grade. Various phonological abilities, nonverbal intelligence, vocabulary, and letter knowledge were assessed in kindergarten and Grade 1. Reading and arithmetic were examined in 1st and 2nd grades. The importance of individual differences in phonological ability for subsequent reading acquisition changed over time. At first, the effects of phonological abilities increased, but after Grade 1, these effects disappeared. Phonological awareness and rapid naming had independent and specific influences on reading achievement. Verbal working memory was associated with both reading and arithmetic acquisition. The results tend to support an interactive view of the relation between development of phonological abilities and learning to read. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kindergarten Prediction of Reading Skills: A Longitudinal Comparative Analysis.

There is considerable focus in public policy on screening children for reading difficulties. Sixty years of research have not resolved questions of what constructs assessed in kindergarten best predict subsequent reading outcomes. This study assessed the relative importance of multiple measures obtained in a kindergarten sample for the prediction of reading outcomes at the end of 1st and 2nd grades. Analyses revealed that measures of phonological awareness, letter sound knowledge, and naming speed consistently accounted for the unique variance across reading outcomes whereas measures of perceptual skills and oral language and vocabulary did not. These results show that measures of letter name and letter sound knowledge, naming speed, and phonological awareness are good predictors of multiple reading outcomes in Grades 1 and 2. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is reading important in reading-readiness programs? A randomized field trial with teachers as program implementers.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness and feasibility of phonological awareness training, with and without a beginning decoding component. 33 teachers in 8 urban schools were assigned randomly within their schools to 3 groups: control, phonological awareness training, and phonological awareness training with beginning decoding instruction and practice. Following training, teachers in the 2 treatment groups conducted the treatments for about 20 wks. In each teacher's class, pre- and posttreatment data were collected on 12–14 children (N?=?404); 312 children were tested again the following fall. At the end of kindergarten, the 2 treatment groups performed comparably and outperformed controls on the phonological awareness measures. On alphabetic (reading and spelling) tasks, however, the group participating in phonological awareness training with beginning decoding instruction did better than the other 2 groups. In the fall of the next year, many of these between-group differences remained but were less impressive. Implications are discussed for bridging research and practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Training the word recognition skills of reading disabled children: Treatment and transfer effects.

54 disabled readers were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 word recognition and spelling training programs or to a problem solving and study skills training program. One word-training program taught orthographically regular words by whole word methods alone; the other trained constituent grapheme–phoneme correspondences. The word-training groups made significant gains in word recognition accuracy and speed and in spelling. Significant transfer was observed on uninstructed spelling content but not on uninstructed reading vocabulary. In general, the word-training programs were equally effective for instructed content, but the whole-word group was superior on some transfer measures at posttest. Although the results demonstrate that dyslexic readers can be instructed successfully, the children did not profit differentially from letter-sound over whole-word training in the present context. We speculate that severely disabled readers may require either a more extended period of letter–sound instruction to reliably adopt an alphabetic decoding strategy or additional specific training in phonological awareness and subsyllabic segmentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changing relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading as children develop from beginning to skilled readers: A 5-year longitudinal study.

Relations between phonological processing abilities and word-level reading skills were examined in a longitudinal correlational study of 216 children. Phonological processing abilities, word-level reading skills, and vocabulary were assessed annually from kindergarten through 4th grade, as the children developed from beginning to skilled readers. Individual differences in phonological awareness were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading for every time period examined. Individual differences in serial naming and vocabulary were related to subsequent individual differences in word-level reading initially, but these relations faded with development. Individual differences in letter-name knowledge were related to subsequent individual differences in phonological awareness and serial naming, but there were no relations between individual differences in word level reading and any subsequent phonological processing ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The double-deficit hypothesis and difficulties in learning to read a regular orthography.

In 2 large longitudinal studies, we selected 3 subgroups of German-speaking children (phonological awareness deficit, naming-speed deficit, double deficit) at the beginning of school and assessed reading and spelling performance about 3 years later. Quite different from findings with English-speaking children, phonological awareness deficits did not affect phonological coding in word recognition but did affect orthographic spelling and foreign-word reading. Naming-speed deficits did affect reading fluency, orthographic spelling, and foreign-word reading. Apparently, in the context of a regular orthography and a synthetic phonics teaching approach, early phases of literacy acquisition (particularly the acquisition of phonological coding) are less affected by early phonological awareness deficits than by later phases that depend on the build up of orthographic memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gastrointestinal manifestations in pediatric AIDS

Current debate over the influence of phonological awareness on early reading development is polarised around small-unit (phoneme) processing and large-unit (onset-rime) processing. These opposing theories were contrasted by assessing the impact of pre-school phonological skills on reading amongst children experiencing their first year of formal instruction by a mixed method. Those beginning readers who could decode nonwords were found to have accomplished this by employing their letter-sound knowledge rather than by making analogies based on familiar rime units. Children displayed this pattern of performance regardless of their pre-school rhyming skills. Further investigations revealed that explicit awareness of onset and rime units was poor, even amongst children whose implicit rhyming skills were excellent. This evidence, together with the children's knowledge of orthographic units, was consistent with the view that letter-sound correspondences rather than onset or rime units formed the basis of their first attempts to utilise phonology in reading. The findings are discussed with reference to instructional influences on early reading and phonological awareness.     

Development of word reading fluency and spelling in a consistent orthography: An 8-year follow-up.

In a longitudinal study, development of word reading fluency and spelling were followed for almost 8 years. In a group of 115 students (65 girls, 50 boys) acquiring the phonologically transparent German orthography, prediction measures (letter knowledge, phonological short-term memory, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and nonverbal IQ) were assessed at the beginning of Grade 1; reading fluency and spelling were tested at the end of Grade 1 as well as in Grades 4 and 8. Reading accuracy was close to ceiling in all reading assessments, such that reading fluency was not heavily influenced by differences in reading accuracy. High stability was observed for word reading fluency development. Of the dysfluent readers in Grade 1, 70% were still poor readers in Grade 8. For spelling, children who at the end of Grade 1 still had problems translating spoken words into phonologically plausible letter sequences developed problems with orthographic spelling later on. The strongest specific predictors were rapid automatized naming for reading fluency and phonological awareness for spelling. Word recognition speed was a relevant and highly stable indicator of reading skills and the only indicator that discriminated reading skill levels in consistent orthographies. Its long-term development was more strongly influenced by early naming speed than by phonological awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Long-Term Effects of Phoneme Awareness and Letter Sound Training: An Intervention Study With Children at Risk for Dyslexia.

Positive long-term effects of phoneme awareness training in kindergarten were found in this study with children of dyslexic parents. Thirty-five at-risk children (attending 26 different classes) participated in an intensive 17-week program in their regular kindergarten classes designed to help them improve in phoneme awareness. Follow-up measures indicated that the trained children outperformed 47 untrained at-risk controls in both word and nonword reading in Grades 2, 3, and 7. For the very poorest readers, significant effects were found--even in Grade 7 reading comprehension. However, the trained at-risk children were found to lag behind a 2nd control group of 41 not-at-risk children in most aspects of reading. Treatment-resistant children had relatively poor phonological representations of known words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge as revealed by their spellings.

Investigated the development of young children's phonological and orthographic knowledge by obtaining nonword spellings from a total of 187 children (45 each from kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade, and 52 from 3rd grade). Results indicated that young children's nonword spellings reflect the joint influences of linguistic knowledge (orthographic and phonological) and psychological processes (working memory limitations) and that these influences vary developmentally. Limited working memory constrains the spelling performance of younger children but not that of older children. For younger children, individual differences in phonological awareness and in working memory account for nearly all of the shared variance between spelling and word decoding; for older children, additional factors are also implicated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive–linguistic foundations of early spelling development in bilinguals.

Developing spelling skills in English is a particularly demanding task for Chinese speakers because, unlike many other bilinguals learning English as a second language, they must learn two languages with different orthography as well as phonology. To disentangle socioeconomic and pedagogical factors from the underlying cognitive–linguistic processes that predict the development of spelling, we used a 6-month longitudinal design and compared children with English as their first language (English-L1; n = 50) and children with Mandarin as their first language (Mandarin-L1; n = 50) from the same kindergarten. Both groups were tested on parallel versions of English and Mandarin tasks as predictors at Time 1, and their spelling sophistication scores were then computed from a 52-item experimental task administered at Time 2. After we controlled for nonverbal IQ, age, vocabulary, and spelling achievement on Wide Range Achievement Test 4 at Time 1, regression analyses showed that phoneme awareness was the strongest predictor of spelling sophistication for English-L1 children, but syllable awareness and letter-sound knowledge were also important for Mandarin-L1 children. The implications of these differences in the cognitive–linguistic processing of bilingual children learning two dissimilar languages are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Home literacy activities and their influence on early literacy skills.

The relationship between the home environments of 66 children (aged 5.4–6.7 yrs) and their language and literacy development was examined. Parents (aged 28–46 yrs) of the children were interviewed regarding demographic information and home visits were conducted in which parents were observed reading with their children and interviewed about specific literacy practices. Children were assessed at approximately 9 mo intervals. After accounting for child age, parent education, and child ability as indexed by scores on a rapid automatized naming task and Block Design of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scales of Intelligence—Revised, shared book reading at home made no contribution to the prediction of the literacy skills of letter name and letter sound knowledge in kindergarten. In contrast, home activities involving letters predicted modest and significant amounts of variance. For the areas of receptive vocabulary and phonological sensitivity, neither shared book reading nor letter activities were predictive. Follow-up to mid-Grade 2 underscored the importance of letter name/sound knowledge and phonological sensitivity in kindergarten in accounting for individual differences in later achievement in reading comprehension, phonological spelling and conventional spelling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Getting off to a better start in reading and spelling: The effects of phonemic awareness instruction within a whole language program.

In the present study the effect of providing phonemic awareness instruction, at school entry, on the reading and spelling progress of 5-yr-old children was examined within a whole language program. In Exp 1, which focused on spelling acquisition, 15 children received phonemic awareness training twice weekly, each time for 20 min, over a 10-wk period, while another group of 15 children was involved in "process writing." In Exp 2, which focused on reading acquisition, 17 children received phonemic awareness training while a 2nd matched group of 17 children participated in other language and reading activities that did not involve phonemic instruction, and a 3rd matched group of 17 children received no extra instruction at all. Overall, the training in the 2 experiments had significant effects on spelling and reading performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Growth in reading skills of children from diverse linguistic backgrounds: Findings from a 5-year longitudinal study.

This article reports on the results of a longitudinal investigation of the reading development of a sample of 824 children (406 girls, 418 boys). The sample included 689 native English-speaking (L1) children and 135 English-language learners (ELLs) representing 33 different native languages. In kindergarten and 4th grade, children's word reading, spelling, phonological processing, syntactic awareness, and working memory skills were assessed with standardized and experimental measures. In addition, word reading was assessed from kindergarten through 4th grade, and reading comprehension in 4th grade. Comparisons of reading skills between the ELLs and the L1 speakers demonstrated that despite slightly lower performance of the ELLs on several kindergarten tasks, differences at 4th grade were negligible. Fourth-grade word reading was predicted by the same kindergarten tasks for both language groups, and prediction of reading comprehension differed by only 1 task. Finally, the trajectory of word reading was nonlinear for both groups, although predictors of this trajectory differed between groups. The findings suggest that early identification models established through research with L1 speakers are appropriate for identifying ELLs at risk for reading difficulties. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Transfer among phonological tasks in kindergarten: Essential instructional content.

The construct of phonological awareness was explored by examining the effects of instructional treatments on the development of specific and generalized phonological skills for kindergarten children. Sixty-six children with low phonological manipulation skills were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 treatments or a control condition: (a) auditory blending and segmenting with limited letter–sound correspondences; (b) a global array of phonological tasks, with letter–sound correspondences; or (c) only letter–sound instruction. Children in both treatments showed improved phonological abilities, which transferred to a reading analog task. Treated children achieved a level of phonological awareness comparable to that of higher skilled children. The combination of blending and segmenting instruction encouraged generalized phonological awareness; however, the ability to blend and segment accounted for more variance in reading analog scores than did other phonological tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predictors of reading and spelling abilities in first- and second-language learners.

This study examined the basic literacy skills and related processes of 1st- through 4th-grade children speaking English as a 1st language (L1) and English as a 2nd language (ESL). The performances of the L1 and ESL children on phonological awareness, word and pseudoword reading, and word and pseudoword spelling tasks were highly similar. The ESL children were at an advantage with regard to lexical access but performed more poorly on verbal working memory and syntactic awareness tasks. The results suggest that the main processes underlying L1 children's basic reading ability in Grades 1 and 2, namely phonological awareness and lexical access, are of equal importance for ESL children. Phonological awareness remained the strongest predictor of word reading ability for L1 and ESL children in Grades 3 and 4. However, the processes involved in L1 and ESL word reading and spelling appeared to vary at other points. Verbal working memory and syntactic awareness were found to be of importance for the word reading and spelling abilities of L1 children but not for ESL children. Lexical access was found to be of more importance for ESL children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of two types of phonological awareness training on word learning in kindergarten children.

The effects of 2 types of oral-language training programs on development of phonological awareness skills and word learning ability were examined. One of the training programs provided explicit instruction on both analytic (segmenting) and synthetic (blending) phonological tasks; the other program trained synthetic skills only. Effects of these programs were contrasted with a language-experience control group that received no phonologically oriented training. 48 kindergarten children participated in small-group training sessions 3 times per week for 7–8 wks. Children who received both analytic and synthetic training improved significantly on both types of skills, whereas children receiving the synthetic skills training alone improved only on blending skills. Only children receiving training on both types of tasks showed a positive training effect for the word learning or reading analog task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties: A specific disability in regular orthographies.

Two large studies identified substantial numbers of German-speaking children (Grade 3) with marked dissociations between reading and spelling difficulties. These dissociations were expected because German exhibits high regularity in the direction of graphemes to phonemes (forward regularity) but not in the direction of phonemes to graphemes (backward regularity). High forward regularity allows reliance on phonological processing in reading (even in advanced fluent reading), whereas low backward regularity requires reliance on orthographic memory representations in spelling. Dysfluent reading in the absence of spelling difficulties was associated only with a naming speed deficit--assessed at school entrance--but not with phonological memory or phonological awareness deficits. In contrast, a specific spelling deficit was preceded by phonological deficits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)