Developing Word Recognition Skills

1. Developing Word Recognition Skills

2. What is a proficient reader? • Can recognize words accurately and with little effort Requires: the use of visual decoding based on familiar letter sequences or orthographic patterns • Decoding skills are necessary to develop proficient word recognition but rarely used by mature fluent reader • Proficient word recognition does not involve sounding words out, it relies on visual, orthographic information rather than phonological information.

3. Logographic Stage (Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985) • Initial visual stage • Stage where children • construct associations between unanalyzed spoken words and one or more salient graphic features of the printed word or its surrounding context • Do not use knowledge of letter names or sound-letter relationships to recognize words

4. Logographic Stage (Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985) • Controversies • No functional value because it ignores correspondences between print and sound at a sub-lexical level • No relationship between logographic reading and later reading ability

5. Transition Phase (Chall, 1983; Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985) • Is there a stage before the alphabetic stage?? • When children use partial phonetic cues to recognize words, typically the initial and final letters

6. Alphabetic Stage • Characterized by the ability to use sound-letter correspondences to decode novel words. • The child links the letters to the particular set of phonemic sounds that comprise the spoken language…they realize that they are the sounds of the spoken language • This insight is a one-time occurrence

7. Alphabetic Stage What is the challenge faced by children?? • Sounds or phonemes that children must associate with letters are abstract linguistic concepts rather than physically real entities and, as such do not always correspond to discrete and invariant sounds • At the word level • Coarticulation sound segments run together in conversation • Lack of correspondence between sounds and letters in English • Allophonic variations of many English sounds

8. Alphabetic Stage • Beyond word level • Effects of coarticulation are greater at the sentence level • Irregularities of English spelling (251 spellings for 44 sounds) • Grapheme letters have a number of script forms and upper-lower case forms (some have as many as 4/5) • Different typewritten forms (example a)

9. Orthographic Stage and Automatic Word Recognition • Characterized by the use of letter sequences and spelling patterns to recognize words visually without phonological conversion • One develops the ability to use a direct visual route without phonological mediation to access semantic memory and word meaning to be able to develop automatic word recognition skills • Begins when children accumulate sufficient knowledge of spelling patterns so that they are able to recognize the words visually without phonogical conversion (Ehri, 1991; Frith, 1985) • Morphemes • Letters sequences in words

10. Problems with Stage Theories of Word Recognition • No empirical support • Focus on knowledge children need to become proficient rather than mechanisms that underlie changes in reading proficiency • Each stage associated to a different type of reading implying that words are read with the same approach at a particular stage • Little attention paid to the development of the knowledge, they only stipulate beginning and end of stage • Simplify development • Omit individual differences

11. Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995; Stanovich, 1995) • Alternative theory • Phonological decoding functions as a self-teaching mechanism that enables the learner to acquire the detailed orthographic representations necessary for fast and accurate visual word recognition and for proficient spelling. • Problems they find • Teaching – too many words to teach, cannot help with all new words • Contextual guessing – • most times the purpose of text is to offer new information – works well with high frequency words but not content words • Guesses are twice likely to be wrong

12. Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995; Stanovich, 1995) The self teaching hypothesis… “each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire the word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition and spelling. In this way, phonological recoding acts as a self-teaching mechanism or built-in teacher enabling the child to independently develop knowledge of specific word spellings and more general knowledge of orthographic conventions” (Share and Stanovich, 1995) Children teach themselves to read.

13. Self-Teaching Hypothesis (Share, 1995; Stanovich, 1995) • Four features of the hypothesis • Item-as opposed to stage-based role of decoding in development • Early onset • Progressive “lexicalization” of word recognition • Asymmetrical relationship between primary phonological and secondary orthographic components in the self-teaching process

14. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features • Item versus stage-based decoding • Previous theories say that all words are initially phonologically decoded with a later development shift access using orthographic information • But, this theory says that it is more appropriate to ask how children gain meaning from “which” words • How often exposed to words • Nature and success of decoding the particular word

15. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features • Implication “If the reading is at the child’s reading level or a little above, a majority of the words will be recognized visually, while the smaller number of low-frequency unfamiliar words will provide opportunities for self-teaching with minimal disruption of ongoing comprehension processes” (Share, 1995)

16. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features 2.Early onset • Self-teaching found very early on • Needed: • Some sound-letter knowledge • Some phonological awareness • Ability to use contextual information to determine exact word pronunciations based on partial decodings • Key---Children DO NOT need to have accurate decoding skills to develop orthographic-based representations • The orthographic representations are primitive but don’t interfere with being used for direct visual access to meaning

17. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features 3.Lexicalization of phonological decoding • Central aspect of self-teaching • Early sound-letter correspondences become lexicalized--- They come to be associated with particular words • As child becomes more attuned to spelling regularities the beyond one-to-one phoneme-grapheme correspondences, this orthographic info is used to modify the initial lexicalizations children develop

18. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features Final Outcome “a skilled reader whose knowledge of the relationships between print and sound has evolved to a degree that makes it indistinguishable from a purely whole-word mechanism that maintains no spelling-sound correspondence rules at the level of individual letters and digraphs”

19. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features 4.Phonological skills are the primary self-teaching mechanism for the acquisition of fluent word recognition • Visual/orthographic factors is secondary and parasitic upon the self-teaching opportunities provided by decoding and print exposure • Phonetic decoding leads children to look at all letters, which leads to recognition of common letter sequences and other orthographic patterns

20. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features Phonological decoding • The most straightforward type of phonological decoding involves identifying and blending together the individual sounds in words • Children find larger units than one-to-one sound blending • They may divide words into onsets and rimes • They start noticing morphemes in different words • They use these language-based units to decode words by making analogies to other words they already know • When new words appear, they recognize the whole word without having to phonetically decode them

21. Self-Teaching Hypothesis – Features Phonological decoding • Is no guarantee to self-teaching • Other factors that are necessary • Quantity and quality of exposure • Ability or inclination to attend to and remember orthographic detail • Writing experiences

22. Reading Comprehension • Readers rely on previously stored knowledge about language and the world • Specific knowledge about text structures and genres • Basic reasoning skills • Analogies • Inferences • Metacognitive abilties

23. Metacognitive abilities • Declarative knowledge is the factual information that one knows; it can be declared—spoken or written. An example is knowing the formula for calculating momentum in a physics class (momentum = mass times velocity). • Procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do something, of how to perform the steps in a process; for example, knowing the mass of an object and its rate of speed and how to do the calculation. • Conditional knowledge is knowledge about when to use a procedure, skill, or strategy and when not to use it; why a procedure works and under what conditions; and why one procedure is better than another. For example, students need to recognize that an exam word problem requires the calculation of momentum as part of its solution.

24. Development of Reading Comprehension • Chall’s stage theory – sees development based on Piaget and stages • Issue with defining reading comprehension development • Difficult to relate processes to reading comprehension – ow do you measure these and relate to reading • Linguistic • Conceptual • Reasoning • Metacognitive • Text-specific

25. Vocabulary Does seem to develop in a discrete quantifiable way

26. Assessment • Problems with assessing comprehension • Focus on informational types of answers • Based on the structuralist view of reading that meaning resides in the text, not in the transaction between the reader and the text • The way comprehension is measured does not change as students progress through school years

27. Alternative views of comprehension • There are multiple meanings available to readers • Texts can be processed at different levels of meaning

28. There are multiple meanings available to readers (Kamhi, 1997) • Meaning does not reside in text, but in transaction between reader and text • Reader-response theorists • There is no independent text • Text cannot be grasped as a whole • Text is a series of changing understandings, interpretations, envisionments • Interpretation influenced by • Sociocultural and cultural attitudes • Personality • Linguistic and conceptual skills • Social-historical context of the author and the reader

29. Texts can be processed at different levels of meaning (Adler and Van Doren, 1972) Levels • First or elementary level • Understanding literal meaning of the words and sentences • Typically assessed in standardized testing • Inspectual or systematic reading • There is a set amount of time to complete assigned reading • One gets the most they can within a given time • The art of skimming systematically

30. Texts can be processed at different levels of meaning (Adler and Van Doren, 1972) Levels 3..Analytical reading • Thorough, complete reading • Best and most complete, unlimited time • Requires deeper and more complete understanding • It is necessary to consider: • Structure of the book • Author’s intentions • Characterization • Plot • Narrator • Ect.

31. Texts can be processed at different levels of meaning (Adler and Van Doren, 1972) Levels 4.Comparative reading • Read many books • Relate books and topics to one another • Critical or novel interpretation • Uses skills acquired level 4