Teaching Word Reading to EFL Children with Poor PA

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Teaching Word Reading to EFL Children with Poor PA

• Huimei Chu
• National Taiwan Normal University

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Review of the Literature
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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, 1990Whitehurst Lonigan,
  2001).

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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.

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• 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.

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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 Goughs study(1983)
• content words (predictability 10)
• function words (predictability 40)

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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).

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• 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).

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• Phonological Awareness
• Beginning readers phonological awareness is the
  best predictor of their future reading ability,
  and training in phonological awareness improves
  childrens 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).

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• 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.

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• 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).

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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?

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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.

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Pretest Phase

• Pretest Measures
• 1. Phonological Awareness Test
• The PA test was adapted from Stahl
  Murrays (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

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• 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. Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices
• The task was administered to the subject
  when they were in the first grade.

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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).

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• (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

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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

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• 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

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Results
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• Figure 1 Number of words correctly pronounced by
  the two groups

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• Figure 2 Number of words correctly pronounced
  understood by the two groups

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• t(54) 2.2, plt .05
• Figure 2 Pretest to posttest scores on the
  initial consonant segmentation test

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• t( 54) 3.8, p lt .001
• Figure 3 Pretest to posttest scores on the
  onset/rime segmentation test
•  

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• t( 54) 0.1, p gt .05
• Figure 4 Pretest to posttest scores on the
  phoneme segmentation test

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• t ( 54) 2.1, plt .05
• Figure 5 Pretest to posttest scores on the
  blending test

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Discussion

• The results show that the phonics group
  had faster acquisition and better retention in
  learning word pronunciation. Moreover, the
  phonics group was also better able to generalize
  the training to decode and spell unfamiliar
  items. Such findings are consistent with
  previous studies (Haskell, Foorman, Swank 1992
  Levy, Bourassa, Horn, 1999 Levy Lysynchuk,
  1997), where children learning to read aloud
  words with segmentation methods (phoneme,
  onset/rime) had better performance than those
  with whole word repetition.
• However, when word comprehension was
  involved, there was no significant difference
  between the two groups. Therefore, for EFL
  reading instruction, further research is required
  to investigate the relationship between word
  decoding and word comprehension.

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• Concerning the development of phonological
  awareness, the phonics group had more gains in
  blending, initial-consonant segmentation and
  onset-rime segmentation but not in phonemic
  segmentation. Actually, both groups performed
  poorly on the phoneme segmentation posttest,
  which supports the previous studies that
  segmentation at the phoneme level is most
  challenging for early readers compared with the
  initial sound and onset/rime segmentation.

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