The Roots of Learning to Read and Write: Acquisition of Letters and Phonemic Awareness in English Language Learner and E

1. The Roots of Learning to Read and Write: Acquisition of Letters and Phonemic Awareness in English Language Learner and English only children. Dr. Theresa Roberts

2. Delighted to be here! • Working with professionals who are: • Knowledgeable • Motivated • Influential

3. Professional orientation to research • Frame the questions • Ask for the data • Scrutinize the data • Respond to the data

4. Major Purposes • Explain the relationships between speech and print • Explain why alphabet letters are very important for early literacy • Discuss instructional approaches for teaching alphabetics • Engage in discussion about “hot topics” • Emphasize how all the above relates to research studies with ELLs

5. Reading: connecting speech and print • Essential task in reading is to connect word pronunciations with written representations of those words • Necessary for comprehension to get a pronunciation of a word

6. Speech and print • Learning these associations/connections between sounds in speech and graphemes in print is decoding: • To help the child make these connections: • Speech sounds - phonological/phonemic awareness knowledge/instruction • Graphemes - letter names/sounds knowledge/instruction

7. What makes speech easy makes reading hard • In speech sounds are interleaved and overlapped (coarticulated) • Speeds speech processing and lowers cognitive demand • In reading, must unconnect these sounds in somewhat artificial manner • phonemic awareness

8. A few misunderstandings • English, while more variable than other languages, is largely systematic in phoneme- grapheme correspondences • Learning to read is somewhat of an “unnatural” process

9. Phases in learning the speech to print connection (Ehri, 1999) • Pre-alphabetic • Partial alphabetic • Full alphabetic • Consolidated alphabetic

10. Pre-alphabeticphase (pre-k - grade 1) • Lack letter knowledge and phonemic awareness • Children resort to use of visual or contextual cues • McDonalds sign, Pepsi label • Do not have word awareness as shown by fingerpoint reading • Characteristic of children with limited informal and formal experience with the alphabet (preschool to grade 1 range)

11. Partial alphabetic phase (pre-K - grade 1) • Know some names/sounds and have some phonemic awareness • Form partial connections between speech and print • /jp/ for “jump” • Very evident in writing • Initial and final sounds more salient • Characteristic of preschool middle class and children with extensive informal and formal PA and alphabetic experiences

12. Full alphabetic phase(k- grade 2) • Know how to segment and blend • Know major vowel and consonant phoneme-grapheme relationships • Have both PA and alphabet knowledge • Characteristic of first grade children with rich PA and alphabetic instruction

13. Consolidated alphabetic phase (Grades 1-3) • Know larger spelling patterns • Silent e • Acquiring extensive sight vocabularies (pronunciation and word spelling glued together in memory) • Accuracy and speed in decoding are important • Characteristic of grade 2 children with extensive reading and good fluency

14. Instructional approaches for developing PA • Purpose of PA instruction is to help children be able to connect letters to phonemes when they read or write letters • Helps children move from pre-alphabetic to partial alphabetic phase

15. Informal and formal approaches to PA • Both informal and formal approaches to teaching phonological/phonemic awareness have been suggested

16. Informal experiences for PA • Nursery rhymes • Challenged • Letter knowledge more powerful than nursery rhymes (Johnston, Anderson & Holligan (1996) • Meaning may get in the way • Inventive spelling • Reading of alphabet books with initial sounds of words emphasized

17. Instruction for PA • Differentiate: • Phonological awareness • Phonemic awareness

18. Instruction for PA • Developmental progression should guide instruction: • Syllable/word counting • Isolating initial phonemes/rhyming/onset-rime • Segmenting and blending • Deleting phonemes • Substituting phonemes

19. Instruction for PA • Many programs are effective at kindergarten and some studies show programs effective at pre-k • Concurrent and later reading-related performance improves with instruction • Instruction most beneficial for those most at risk

20. Alphabet letters are our friends • Knowledge of alphabet letters and phonemic awareness are the two best predictors of beginning reading competence • Alphabet letter knowledge influences later reading as well, but less strongly • Includes knowing shapes, names, sounds • Which is most critical?

21. Learning alphabet letters • Is substantially a paired associate learning task • Is difficult- there are 40 shapes to be learned whose names are arbitrary • Requires significant practice • Children are oriented to meaning rather than print (write apple in red, believe “bear” should be a longer word than “caterpillar”) • What are the implications for learning of these facts ?

22. Alphabet letter factoids • All but one letter name contains clues to a phoneme it represents • Letters with the name at the beginning are easier to learn than those with the name at the end (letter b vs. letter f ) • Capital letters are easier to learn than lower case letters • There are 40 different shapes to be learned • Some letters are highly confusable with other letters

23. Informal and formal approaches to the alphabet • Like PA, both informal and formal learning approaches have been suggested

24. Informal experience for learning letters • Singing the alphabet song • Manipulating alphabet letters • Learning to write personal names • Watching Sesame Street etc. • Reading alphabet books • Reading storybooks • Attending to environmental print • Rank these from most to least effective

25. Writing your name gets your letter name learning engine going • Name and letter knowledge linked (Bloodgood, 1999) • 3-year old’s name knowledge in advance of other literacy • Know names of letters in own name best (Treiman & Broderick, 1998) • Names, not sounds, promoted by personal name knowledge

26. Book reading • During storybook reading, little attention directed to letters • Alphabet book reading with attention to letters and words containing them (usually initial sounds) can be effective • For ELLs, alphabet letter instruction decontextualized from storybook reading more effective. • What might be the reasons for this?

27. Alphabet song • Familiarizes children with the letter names • Depends on how it is used whether it teaches the letter names and the letter shapes • How might teaching ensure the alphabet song helps with learning letter shapes?

28. Environmental print • Children are actually learning the visual signs and are not attending to print • Studies where arches removed from McDonald’s and Pepsi written separately show children cannot recognize the print • Fail to recognize changes in the print • “xepsi” for “pepsi”

29. Instructional principles for learning letters • Learn to recognize visually and write letters • Connect the letter names/sounds with the grapheme repeatedly • Oral production important • Need sufficient instruction and practice

30. Methods of teaching alphabetics • Mnemonics • Help with making the letters efficiently • templates • Names versus sounds • All letters but one contain clues to the sounds • Letter names are more stable than letter sounds-important for ELLs • Make letters and sounds concrete and stable

31. Mnemonics principles • Link letters to sounds in words • Integrated picture mnemonics • When the mnemonic does not link letters to their sounds, only limited benefit(Marsh & Desberg, 1978) • Pumpkin picture for /p/ • Boy blowing out a candle and saying /p/ • When pictures removed, no advantage • May be best used for initial learning

32. Integrated mnemonic

33. Help with making the letters efficiently • Templates with directionality • Modeling of correct letter making • Attend to the fine motor control challenges of young children • White boards • Writing experiences

34. Names versus sounds • All letter names but one contain clues to a sound for that letter • Letter names are more stable than letter sounds-important for ELLs • More sounds than letters so ultimately need to systematically include all sounds • /sh/

35. Making alphabetics concrete • Particularly important for Ells with limited English • Use markers, tiles, movable letters • A reason letter names may be preferred over letter sounds for initial instruction • Particularly important for PA instruction- why?

36. A big worry • Low income and English learners are much more likely to enter K with limited letter knowledge • Teachers are also more reluctant to offer such instruction to these same children • Programs for low income children have not had a strong emphasis on and effectiveness in teaching letters

37. Hot topics: Preschool reading foundations • What to develop? • How much attention to decoding skills? • Are letter names or letter sounds best? • Upper case or lower case, sequence of letters, rhyming? • How to develop? • Teacher led versus child-initiated? • Contextualized versus decontextualized? • When to develop? • - Is preschool too early? • Child interest? • English oral proficiency?

38. Research study citations: • Roberts, T. (2003). Effects of alphabet letter instruction on young children’s word recognition. Journal of Educational Psychology,95, 41-51. • Roberts, T. & Neal, H. (2004). Relationships among preschool English language learner’s Oral proficiency in English, instructional experience and literacy development. Contemporary Educational Psychology,29, 283-311. • Ehri, L. C. & Roberts, T. A. (2005). The roots of learning to read and write. In Newman, S. & Dickinson, D. (Eds.), Handbook of early literacy research, vol.II, pp.113-131. New York, NY: Guilford Press. • Roberts, T. (2005). Articulation accuracy and vocabulary size contributions to phonemic awareness and word reading in English language learners. Journal of Educational Psychology,97(4), 601-616.

39. Purpose of my studies • Development of alphabetic knowledge in preschool and kindergarten English Language Learners from two language groups • Developmental patterns in the context of instructional experience (explicit, small group, decontextualized) • Relationships among alphabetic knowledge and other components of language and reading (oral proficiency, pronunciation)

40. Participants • Preschool and kindergarten ELLs from low socioeconomic families • Two preschool studies (35-44 children) • Two kinder studies (126 and 27 children) • Children attended one site • Drawn from all 4 preschool classes and all 5 kindergarten classes at the school • Hmong, Spanish and English primary languages • All learning to read in L2 only (70-80% of ELLs in US)

41. Preschool instructional variation • Random assignment across teachers • Treatments: • Alphabet letter/rhyme instruction • Comprehension/vocabulary instruction • Decontextualized vs contextualized alphabet instruction • Differences in the studies: • Duration (8 or 16 weeks) • Frequency (2 or 3X weekly) • Type (decontextualized vs contextualized )

42. Preschool measures • Letter naming (0-16) • Rhyme generation (0-10) • Storybook vocabulary (0-30) • Paired associate learning of simplified word spellings (6 word pairings, 7 trials) (0-42) • Phonetic (“BL” for “ball”, “JMP” for “jump”) • Visually distinct (“QN” for “ball”, “cFy” for “jump”) • Pre-IPT test of English oral proficiency

43. Is knowing letters causally connected to word reading? • Experimental study (Roberts, 2003) • Previous evidence correlational • Studies from 1980s concluded not causal • Ehri (1983) critiqued these studies • I decided to retest this with improved methodology in predominantly ELL population

44. Methodology • Random assignment to explicit alphabet letter instruction or storybook reading instruction • Taught 16 letters- 16 weeks- letters A-P • After instruction ended taught children paired associate word spellings and tested their learning of these words over one session

45. Word learning trials • Children taught to spell three kinds of words: • simplified phonetic spellings based on letters included in the letter instruction (e.g. “BL” for “ball”; “KND” for “candy”); • simplified phonetic spellings with letters not included in letter instruction (e.g. “ZR” for “zipper”; “RYS” for “rice”) • visually distinct spellings (e.g. “sT” for lunch; “cFy” for “apple”) • If letter knowledge a cause, what should happen?

46. Phonetic spellings with taught letters

47. Phonetic spellings with letters not taught

48. Visually distinctive spellings