Teaching Word Reading to EFL Children with Poor PA

1. Teaching Word Reading to EFL Children with Poor PA Huimei Chu National Taiwan Normal University

2. Review of the Literature

3. Two Essential Processes of Reading Reading is generally conceived as involving two interdependent sets of processes: word recognition and text comprehension. These two processes operate simultaneously and interact with each other. Skilled reading results from good coordination of these two essential processes (Adams, 1990;Whitehurst & Lonigan, 2001).

4. Text Comprehension Text comprehension involves subprocesses of several hierarchical levels (Adams, 1990). At the bottom level, the reader retrieves the meaning of each individual word encountered in a text. At the next level, the reader combines the meanings of these individual words and makes a collective interpretation.

5. At the third level, the reader must relate the words or phrases processed to his/her world knowledge so as to construct their comprehension of the text. At this level, the comprehension process goes beyond the text. Inferential skill is involved. As can be seen, to be able to recognize words and retrieve their meanings is essential for reading comprehension.

6. Word Recognition Word recognition can be developed in three different ways: direct instruction (whole word) decoding (phonics) contextual guessing: Using contextual information to derive a semantically plausible candidate for an orthographic unfamiliar word. According to Gough�s study(1983): content words (predictability: 10%) function words (predictability: 40%)

7. Key Components of English Early Reading Letter Knowledge Research has shown that letter knowledge at school entry is one of the best predictors of eventual reading achievement (Adams, 1990). Such a finding is logical because decoding, the essential skill in word recognition, involves mapping letters onto their sounds. A reader who is unable to distinguish the individual letters of the alphabet will have difficulty learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (Mason, 1980).

8. Grapheme-phoneme Correspondences Like letter knowledge, knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences is also one of the important components in learning decoding. The English language is comparatively less transparent so that the grapheme-phoneme correspondences can be quite complex. Because of the complexity of the system, introducing such correspondences to beginning readers usually starts with the basic knowledge of simple one-to-one correspondences. Although such correspondences are incomplete and oversimplified, they can serve as a scaffold for refining and expanding knowledge of the English spelling-sound system (Share, 1995).

9. Phonological Awareness Beginning readers� phonological awareness is the best predictor of their future reading ability, and training in phonological awareness improves children�s word recognition skill (e.g. see Adams, 1990 for a review). Children with strong phonological awareness learn to read words with greater ease than those with weak phonological awareness; and children with poor phonological awareness are likely to be poor readers (Blachman, 2000). Phonological awareness, especially the ability to detect phonemes (i.e., phonemic awareness), is essential to the understanding of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (Blachman, 2000).

10. Poor PA and poor word reading skill However, phonemic awareness is not acquired naturally for many beginning readers. Many children have great difficulty in segmenting spoken words at the phonemic level (Tunmer & Hoover, 1992; Blachman, 2000). If children cannot perceive the individual sounds in spoken words, they will have difficulty matching a grapheme with the phoneme it represents and do not benefit from decoding instruction. Juel (1988) finds that children entered first grade with poor phonemic awareness could not benefit form decoding (phonics) instructions, where grapheme-phoneme correspondences are emphasized.

11. Due to the prevalence of phonemic awareness problems observed in young children, quite a lot of training research into initial word recognition has focused on comparing word recognition instruction methods that emphasize segmentation training (onset/rime, phonemic) with the method that focuses on whole word repetition (e.g., Haskell, Foorman, & Swank, 1992; Levy, Bourassa, & Horn, 1999; Levy & Lysynchuk, 1997; Vellutino & Scanlon,1986).

12. Research Questions For EFL children from a logographic language background and with poor PA, what method will be more optimal in teaching them to recognize words? Research questions addressed in this study included: 1. Is whole word method or phonics more effective in developing their initial word recognition? 2. Do the two methods contribute similarly or differently to the children� PA development?

13. Method Participants Original cohort: 311 Taiwanese 3rd graders from Taipei Subject selection criteria: Children with PA scores at the bottom 25% of the original cohort, excluding those with poor letter-name knowledge and low nonverbal IQ Final sample: 58 children (31 males, 27 female) English learning experience: The first-year English learning at school Letter-sound correspondences were introduced in class.

14. Pretest Phase Pretest Measures 1. Phonological Awareness Test The PA test was adapted from Stahl & Murray�s (1994) Tests of Phonemic Awareness. (1) Initial consonant segmentation (2) Onset/rime segmentation (3) Phoneme segmentation (4) Blending Ten monosyllabic spoken words on each of the 4 PA subtests, five items with single consonant onsets, the other five with cluster onsets Five practice trials for each subtest Reliability (Spearman-Brown): (1).86 (2).88 (3).87 (4).84

15. 2. Letter-name Knowledge Task Children were asked to circle the letter the examiner said from an array of four choices. 26 items, Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .94 3. Letter-sound Knowledge Task Children were asked to find the letter corresponding to the sound the examiner said. 30 items, Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .72 4. Raven�s Colored Progressive Matrices The task was administered to the subject when they were in the first grade.

16. Training Phase (1) Trained Words 30 monosyllabic words derived from 6 rime families (-ack, -est, -in, -op, -ug, -ail) each word printed on a A4-sized card presented with its picture words with the same rime presented in a consecutive order (2) Training Sections: Each child in the two groups received one-on-one instruction to read aloud the 30 trained words and learn their meanings through pictures . On the first day, the experimenter read through the set only once, and then the child read through the set in the same manner. On all subsequent days, only the child read the words and the experimenter simply provided corrective feedback. On each day of training, the two groups read through the set once only. The sequence of the 30 words presented to children in the two groups did not differ. The main difference between the two training conditions was how the 30 words were printed and how they were taught. The training lasted 4 weeks (4 days per week, a test given on the fifth day each week).

17. Phonics Group: In this group, the trained words were printed in two difference colors, with the onsets in blue and the rimes in red (e.g. , nest, shack), . On the first day, the experimenter presented each word with its picture and then demonstrated sounding out each phoneme and then blending the phonemes into the whole word. The child then sounded out and blended each phonemes of the word presented. On the following days, each trained word was presented with its picture and the child sounded out each phoneme and blend them together, and the experimenter provided feedback only when the child could not pronounce a word or pronounced it incorrectly.

18. Whole Word Group: In this group, the trained words were printed in blue (e.g, nest, shack). The experimenter presented each word with its picture and then pronounced the whole word with no segmental breaks. The child then repeated the words three times (to ensure children in either group spent about the same amount of time in learning each word). Corrective feedback was also given at the whole word level.

19. (3) Weekly Word Recognition Tests The weekly word recognition test evaluated both word pronunciation and word comprehension of the 30 trained words. The 30 trained words were administered to the two training groups every week (the 5th day of each week) during the four-week training. Both groups were asked to read aloud each of the 30 words printed in black and chose its picture from an array of four pictures. Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .93

20. Post Training Phase Posttest Measures 1. Generalization Test: given to children three days after the training was completed (1) Decoding Unfamiliar Words 30 items (17 nonwords and 13 real words), constructed using the onsets and rimes occurred in the trained words Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .93 (2) Spelling Nonwords 30 items, derived from changing the onsets of the 30 trained words Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .81

21. 2. Retention test: given to children one week after the training was completed. (1) Reading aloud the 30 trained words and selecting their corresponding pictures (2) Spelling the 30 trained words: Reliability (Spearman-Brown): .92 3. Phonological awareness test: same as the PA pretest

22. Results

24. Figure 1 Number of words correctly pronounced by the two groups