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Stephanie Al Otaiba (Florida State University)Connor, Carol; Meadows, Jane; Petscher, Yaacov; Greulich, Luana; Sidler, Jessica; and Lang, Laura - Responsiveness to Kindergarten Reading Instruction: Examining the Interactions among Student Characteristics, Reading Instruction, and Student Outcomes
Purpose
This study describes kindergarten literacy instruction, exploring the relation between amount of instruction, how this instruction is implemented, and student outcomes, including child X instruction interactions. Our primary purpose is to learn more about the characteristics of children who do not respond to effective classroom reading instruction.
Method
Participants were 22 teachers and 250 children. Observations occurred three times per year during the 90 minute literacy block. Videos are being coded to determine the amount of time each target child received and the specific focus of instruction (phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension), who managed instruction (teacher-mediated, or child-mediated), and what instructional materials were used. We also used an adaptation of Haager et al.’s (2004) likert rating scale toe valuate teaching behaviors. A large variety of standardized student measures (IQ, working memory, phonological awareness, language, literacy, and behavior) were administered to describe child X instruction interactions).
Results and Conclusion
The study has been completed; data analysis, using HLM to model growth and to explore interactions, is underway. Preliminary findings on student outcomes indicate that most children reached grade level reading skills; however, about 5% of children did not. We will examine child X instruction interactions that we anticipate will extend the literature on responsiveness to instruction.
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Melissa Allen (University of Wyoming) - A Comparison of Assessment Tools and Methodologies for Identifying Children’s Responsiveness to Early Literacy Intervention
Purpose: This study investigated the use of three assessment tools and two different methodologies to identify participants’ responsiveness to early literacy intervention.
Method: Thirty-two first grade children participated in the study: 21 were at-risk and 11 were developing normally. The WRMT-R, TOWRE, and the DIBELS ORF measures were given as pre-test and post-test measures. The children at-risk were provided an intensive early literacy intervention over an eight week period.
Results: The three measures at post-testing did not identify the same children as at-risk for reading difficulties (WRMT-R =19%, TOWRE=62%, ORF=95%). The participants were divided into three groups: good growth (GG), poor growth (PG), and control based on ORF slope (3 points). The participants in the GG group made significantly larger grains in ORF score than both the PG and control groups. Based on slope, only 48% of participants remained at-risk, while 95% percent of the participants did meet the criterion level. The control group was significantly more accurate than the GG and PG groups on the initial ORF measure.
Conclusion: The findings suggest that the specific assessment tool and methodology chosen to measure growth in early literacy skills has a specific impact on the number of students identified as at-risk.
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Lori Altmann (Communication Sciences and Disorders) ;Lombardino, Linda J.; Ginsburg, Jordan - Pervasive Effects of Dyslexia on Sentence Production in Adults
Purpose: This study investigated the effects of dyslexia on four aspects of sentence production: fluency, grammaticality, response times and sentence structure choice.
Method: Twenty-eight adults with normal reading (NR) and nineteen adults with dyslexia (aged 16-28) participated. Participants completed working memory (WM), vocabulary, and executive function tasks, plus a timed word reading task. In the experimental task, participants produced a sentence including 3 words: 2 nouns and a transitive verb from one of 4 types.
Results: Participants with dyslexia produced significantly fewer fluent and grammatical sentences than NRs, even with word reading accuracy covaried. Participants with dyslexia responded slower than NRs, even with word reading time covaried. In both analyses, group interacted with stimulus conditions. Participants with dyslexia produced similar numbers of passive sentences as NRs, but these were distributed differently across stimulus conditions. Group differences in performance were related to word reading ability and WM.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that dyslexia has pervasive effects on many aspects of sentence production when the language production system is stressed. Based on persistent group differences in fluency, grammaticality and response times even with word reading ability covaried, it appears that manipulating words into sentences can be difficult for adults with dyslexia
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Jason Lon Anthony (University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston) - EVALUATION OF THE RAISING A READER PROGRAM WITH AT-RISK PRESCHOOL CHILDREN
Purpose: This multiyear project evaluates the additive effects of a book exchange program and a parent education program for at-risk preschool children.
Method: The Raising a Reader program involves weekly rotation of four new books in and out of children’s homes as well as partnering preschool classrooms and families with neighborhood libraries. The parent education program involves monthly “Family Nights” in which parents learn about and practice shared reading techniques with their children. Content of the Family Nights program includes strategies often associated with Dialogic Reading interventions. This study reports on the first annual cohort of participants, which included children and families from 23 preschool classrooms. Classrooms were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Control, Raising a Reader, or Raising a Reader plus Family Nights. A variety of school readiness skills were assessed during pretesting and posttesting of 153 children. Most participating children came from ethnic minority and low SES backgrounds.
Results: Multilevel ANCOVAs found that children in the Raising a Reader plus Family Nights group demonstrated significantly higher end-of-year language scores on standardized measures of complex language usage.
Conclusions: These preliminary findings based on a limited sample, which will ultimately include 126 classrooms and 1000 children, suggest that putting high quality children’s literature in the homes of at-risk children and providing parents with optimal shared-reading strategies can be an effective means of fostering children’s oral language development, which is critical for reading acquisition and scholastic success.
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Kenn Apel (Dept. of Comm. Disorders, Florida State University)Arndt, Elissa J.;Puranik, Cynthia S. - Vowel Development in Children’s Writing
Purpose: Little is known about vowel spelling development. Without solid developmental knowledge, the scope and sequence of instruction is limited.
Method: In this study, we examined prevalence and accuracy of vowel spellings (short, long, diphthong, r-, and l-controlled) in simple morpheme words and the base of multi-morphemic words taken from written samples provided by 120 children in grades one through four. Prevalence was defined as at least one correct use of a vowel spelling; accuracy was the total number of correctly spelled productions divided by total opportunities for each vowel. We also examined differences in error types for short and long vowels (i.e., errors due to insufficient phonological knowledge, orthographic knowledge, or mental orthographic images).
Results: Results revealed both within and across grade differences in prevalence, accuracy, and error type. For example, within vowel categories (e.g., long vowels), grade differences for prevalence existed for some vowels (i.e., a, o, u) but not others. Accuracy differences among grades differed by vowel category. Although grades did not differ on error types due to phonological knowledge, grade differences were noted for errors due to orthographic knowledge and mental orthographic images.
Conclusion: Discussion will focus on the educational and clinical implications of the findings.
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Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv University) - Story reading and story telling: Differences in the nature of maternal mediation
Purpose
The purpose of the study was to explore differences and similarities in a mother’s mediation styles when telling and reading a story to her kindergarten child.
Method
Participants were 50 mother-child pairs of middle SES. The children's means ages was 62 months (SD = 7.05). Two sessions, held in the families' homes, were videotaped. The mother read the child a story from an illustrated book with text in one session and told a story from an illustrated book without text in the other session. The order of the sessions was arbitrary.
Results
Results indicated differences in maternal mediation styles when telling a story compared with reading a story. Mothers mediated on a higher level when telling a story (asking higher-level questions, referring to the meaning of words, etc.). In addition, the children were more involved in interaction when their mothers told them a story compared with interactions when they were read a story. Furthermore, we found that mothers had a mediation style beyond the type of story.
Conclusions
While until now, the picture book genre has been associated with babies and toddlers, the results of this study indicate that this genre can also be suitable and beneficial for story telling interactions with kindergartners.
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Dorit Aram (Tel Aviv University); Tova Most; Hanny Mayfit - Alphabetic and linguistics knowledge of Kindergartners with Hearing Loss:
The Contributions of Mother-Child Joint Writing and Storybook Telling
PURPOSE. The study investigated mother-child joint writing and storybook telling as predictors of alphabetic and linguistic knowledge among kindergartners with hearing loss. METHOD. Participants were 30 Israeli kindergartners with hearing loss and their hearing mothers. Early literacy assessments tapped children's alphabetic skills (word writing, word recognition, and letter knowledge) and linguistic skills (phonological awareness, general knowledge, and receptive vocabulary). Each mother helped her child write words and told her child the story of a wordless book. Both interactions underwent videotaping and analysis. RESULTS. We found that maternal writing mediation correlated with the children's alphabetic skills. whereas maternal storybook telling correlated with their linguistic skills, A series of 3-step hierarchical regression analyses revealed that beyond children's age, children's degree of hearing loss, and storybook telling, joint writing predicted word writing (15%), word recognition (31%), and letter knowledge (36%). beyond children's age, children's degree of hearing loss, and joint writing, storybook telling predicted children's phonological awareness (22%), general knowledge (28%), and receptive vocabulary (18%). CONCLUSIONS. The study suggests that both joint writing and storybook reading interactions are productive contexts for promoting the major aspects of early literacy among children with hearing loss. Parents should not give up on any of these contexts.
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Diane August (Center for Applied Linguistics); Carlo, Maria; Barr, Chris; Calderon, Margarita - Predictors of Growth in English Reading Comprehension for
Young Spanish-Speaking English Language Learners
Purpose
This longitudinal study investigated the development of English reading comprehension in eighty-two young Spanish-speaking English-language learners.
Methods
The study took place in schools implementing Success for All (SFA)/Éxito para Todos curriculum. Across sites, some students received English-only instruction, some bilingual instruction, and some Spanish-only instruction. Students’ performance was measured at four time points between the beginning of their third grade year and the end of their fifth grade year. Growth modeling was used to examine between-group differences in English reading comprehension growth and to evaluate the relationship between English reading comprehension growth and initial levels of oral English and Spanish proficiency.
Results
Results indicated that students who received reading instruction first in Spanish and then transitioned into English (bilingual model) showed significantly higher rates of growth in English reading comprehension than students instructed only in English or only in Spanish. Initial levels of Spanish reading comprehension influenced the rate of growth in English reading comprehension for the bilingually-instructed students, but not for English-only or Spanish-only instructed students. Despite the differences across the groups in time devoted to English instruction, the English-only and bilingual groups did not differ in level of ultimate attainment in 5th grade English reading comprehension.
Conclusion
Findings highlight the important role of oral proficiency and instrutional context on the development of literacy.
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Mahshid Azimi (OISE/Universtiry of Toronto)Azimi,Mahshid; Geva,Esther - Challenges of Second Language Learners: Morphology and Spelling
This longitudinal study examined the effects of language status and reading disability on children’s spelling development of 2 inflectional morphological markers: plural nouns and regular past tense verbs. The sample consisted of 46 English-as-a-second language (ESL) and 24 English-as-first language (EL1) students (35 non-RD, 35 RD) who were matched on a case-by-case basis on home language background and non-verbal ability. ANOVA’S and correlational statistics were applied to (a) compare the development of morphological skills in spelling plural and past tense markers in ESL and EL1 students, and (b) examine the extent to which correct spelling of stems relates to the spelling of the past tense and plural markers. Results indicated a similar pattern of development of the spelling of the target morphemes in ESLs and EL1s. Regardless of their home languages, RD students lagged behind their non-RD counterparts. Children who spelled the stems correctly were more likely to spell accurately plurals and past tense markers.
The findings are discussed in terms of the ESL/EL1 and reading disabilities literature and implications for early assessment and intervention.
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Selma Babayigit (University of the West of England, Bristol);Hulme,Charles - Longitudinal predictors of reading comprehension skills in Turkish speaking children
Purpose. We wished to assess the longitudinal predictors of reading comprehension skills in children learning to read in a highly regular orthography (Turkish).
Method. Fifty -five children (mean age = 67.45 months, SD= 3.64) were assessed at the end of preschool (before reading instruction began), and at the end of grade 1 and grade 2, on a wide range of measures including listening comprehension, grammatical awareness, vocabulary, short-term memory, and working memory.
Results. Longitudinal path analyses showed that Grade 1 reading comprehension was predicted by preschool measures of short-term memory, listening comprehension, and grammatical awareness. Grade 2 reading comprehension was predicted by grade 1 reading comprehension (autoregressor), vocabulary, and listening comprehension. In contrast, none of our measures of decoding skill (reading speed, reading accuracy, spelling) were unique predictors of reading comprehension.
Conclusions. We relate our results to the Simple View of Reading. In the highly regular Turkish orthography efficiency of decoding skills relatively unimportant as determinants of variations in Reading Comprehension, while in contrast linguistic comprehension skills appear to assume great importance.
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Iuliana Elena Baciu (Wilfrid Laurier University);Gottardo, Alexandra - Training vocabulary and phonological awareness in preschool at risk children
The impact of two training programs was evaluated through a repeated measure design with a control group. The first program combined phonological awareness activities with instruction in the alphabetic principle, teaching of Dolch words (May & Rizzardi, 2002) and of commonly used words in school (Scarborough, 2003). The second program combined teaching vocabulary through building larger semantic networks, phonological awareness activities coupled with instruction in the alphabetic principle (offered in the same amount of time of as in the first program), and instruction in commonly used words in school (Scarborough, 2003). The intervention targeted low socio-economic status preschool children (3 ½ to 4 ½), belonging to two language groups: native English speaking children and English-as-a-second language children (ESL). The results show that the children participating in the vocabulary intervention showed better performance on vocabulary than children in both the first training group and the control group (results of time and training interaction for PPVT approaching significance at p = .065). Additionally, children participating in both training groups showed significantly improved phonological awareness skills than children in the control group. The results show that it is possible to effectively train vocabulary with very young at risk children, while effectively training phonological awareness skills.
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Marcia A. Barnes (University of Guelph) ;Jack M.Fletcher; Maureen Dennis - Attention and reading skills in children with Spina Bifida
Purpose: Spina Bifida Myelomeningocele (SBM) is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with good development of word decoding, but less skilled comprehension. Attention difficulties are also common in SBM. In children with AD/HD but no frank neurological impairment, behavioral ratings of inattention are highly predictive of some academic skills. Relations between reading skills and behavioral ratings of attention in SBM are tested.
Method: Ratings of inattention and hyperactivity (parent SNAP Rating Scale) were used to predict reading comprehension (Paragraph Reading from the Test of Reading Comprehension and Passage Comprehension from the WJ-R), reading fluency (TOWRE), and listening comprehension (Making Inferences from the TLC-E) in 101 children with SBM and 37 typically developing controls.
Results – After controlling for reading accuracy, neither inattention nor hyperactivity were related to reading comprehension or listening comprehension, but inattention and hyperactivity were related to reading fluency. The model accounted for 66% of the variance in TOWRE scores. Attention was not differentially predictive of any of the reading outcomes in the two groups.
Conclusions – The findings are discussed with reference to current models of reading comprehension in SBM, and possible similarities and differences in neurocognitive mechanisms underlying attention and reading difficulties in SBM and neurologically intact individuals with AD/HD.
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Rod Barron (University of Guelph);Lovett, Maureen W; Frijters, Jan C; Lane, Sara; Ashrafhosseini, Diana; Morris, Robin D; Wolf, Maryanne; Sevcik, Rose A - Evaluating a delay versus deficit model of letter-sound learning in children with reading disabilities
Purpose
Letter-sounds represent foundation knowledge for reading in English (Treiman et al., 1998) but little is known about disabled readers’ letter-sound learning. For example, do their weak phonemic awareness skills impair ability to use the sounds (/b/) embedded in some letter name syllables (/bi/) in learning letter (B)–sound (/b/) associations?
Method
We identified beginning reader (N=150; CA=5yrs, 1mo.; word ID=5.1 words, word attack=1.6 nonwords) and disabled reader (N=220, CA=7yrs, 6mo; word ID=15.6 words, word attack=1.9 nonwords) groups. Letter-sound knowledge for letters whose names (B = /bi/, L = /εl/) contain sounds in the beginning (/b/) or end positions (/l/) of their letter names, or are not in their letter names, was assessed as well as for letters with one (T) versus two (E) associated sounds.
Results
Both groups showed mean performance patterns of 1) beginning> end > sound not in letter name and 2) one > two letter sounds. Phonemic awareness accounted for unique variance (7-15%) in each letter-sound category (age, RAN, PPVT-R controlled) for both groups.
Conclusions
A delay rather than a deficit model was supported; reading disabled and younger, normally developing children display similar patterns of performance and phonemic awareness skills in acquiring letter-sound knowledge.
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Amy Barth (University of Houston);Cirino, Paul; Vaughn, Sharon; Denton, Carolyn; Romain, Melissa; Francis, David; Fletcher, Jack - The Heterogeneity of Adolescent Readers
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the nature of reading problems in middle school students. Guiding questions include: What is the prevalence of difficulties in reading comprehension, fluency, and decoding skill? What proportion of struggling readers change over the course of the year?
Method: Participants included 1867 students in grades 6-8. Participants were assessed in domains involving decoding, spelling, fluency, and comprehension. Participants were assigned to reading ability groups based on the presence-absence and types of reading deficits that were identified.
Results: Results indicate that of students failing the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, 75% met criteria for difficulty in comprehension, decoding, and/or fluency. 19% showed comprehension difficulties. 81% decoding and/or fluency difficulties with 6% having only decoding difficulties, 12% having only fluency difficulties, 32% having problems in both domains, and 31% having problems in all domains. At year end, 73% exhibited difficulty in decoding and/or fluency with 4% experiencing having only decoding difficulties and 6% only fluency difficulties, 27% having decoding and fluency problems and 22% having problems in all domains.
Conclusions: Accuracy and fluency difficulties continue to be problematic in adolescent struggling readers in addition to deficits in reading comprehension.
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Lindsay Bell (University of Michigan Department of Psychology);Connor, Carol; Morrison, Frederick - The Impact of Classroom Interruptions on Literacy Skill Growth
Purpose
This study examined the impact of external disruptions in preschool classrooms on children’s literacy growth, focusing particularly on children with low self-regulation.
Method
Participants included 151 3-4-year-old children from middle-class families. Self-regulation was assessed using Head-to-Toes, in which children are required to do the opposite of a prepotent response. Alphabet recognition was tested using a deck of uppercase-letter alphabet cards. Classrooms were observed for one full school day, and the duration of interruptions was coded in minutes. Interruptions included fire drills, loudspeaker announcements, and external teachers or students entering the room. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the interaction between children’s self-regulation and classroom interruptions on spring alphabet recognition.
Results
For children with low or moderate fall self-regulation scores, increasing classroom interruptions yielded poorer spring alphabet performance (approximately four fewer and two fewer letters, respectively). Children with high fall self-regulation actually showed an increase in alphabet recognition with increasing classroom interruptions.
Conclusions
These results document the importance of disruptions to the classroom environment for the academic growth of children with low to moderate self-regulation skills. Children with high self-regulation appear to be resilient to classroom interruptions. However, for children who lack this resilience, these interruptions significantly impacted an important emergent literacy skill.
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Nanci Bell (Lindamood-Bell Learning Processes) - The Challenges of Improving Comprehension for Tier 3 Students
Purpose—The purpose of this study was to determine if students who have been identified as requiring Tier 3 intervention (as defined in the Response to Intervention model) and who have comprehension deficits show progress after a specific intervention designed to stimulate imagery related to comprehension.
Method—Students with comprehension deficits were identified from two districts using an RtI approach that included instruction using the Visualizing and Verbalizing for Language Comprehension and Thinking® Program in intensive intervention. The program is closely aligned to Paivio’s Dual Coding Theory as a theoretical basis for comprehension instruction that integrates mental imagery and verbal processing. Once assessed with a battery of nationally normed language skill tests, students were placed in homogeneous groups and received daily instruction for at least one term before post-testing.
Results—Assessment and any available progress monitoring results will be presented and aligned to a model of comprehension and its relation to decoding skills and imagery.
Conclusion—Substantial gains were achieved on decoding and comprehension measures. The progress that these Tier 3 students made suggests that intensive intervention using instruction designed to stimulate the imagery-language connection can have a substantial effect over a relatively short elapsed time.
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Rebecca S. Betjemann (University of Colorado) ;Erik G.Wilcutt; Richard K.Olson; Sally, J. Wadsworth; Janice M.Keenan; John, C. DeFries; Bruce, F. Pennington - Accounting for the cognitive overlap between reading and attention: A genetic investigation of processing speed
Purpose
There is high comorbidity between Reading Disability (RD) and Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and research has shown they share common genetic influence. Recent phenotypic findings suggest that common deficits in processing speed may account for much of the cognitive overlap between reading and inattention. Here, we evaluate whether the genetic factors influencing processing speed also account for the genetic overlap between reading and inattention.
Method
Participants were twins from the Colorado Learning Disabilities Research Center, ages 8 – 18. We used Cholesky decomposition analyses to investigate the multivariate genetic influence on the following factors: Motor Processing Speed, Verbal Processing Speed, Word Reading, Attention Ratings, and Hyperactivity/Impulsivity Ratings.
Results
The genetic correlation between reading and inattention was .42, supporting previous findings of shared genetic influence between reading and inattention. The Cholesky decomposition showed common genetic influence shared between processing speed, reading, inattention, and hyperactivity/impulsivity. After that shared with processing speed, there was no additional genetic influence shared between reading and inattention.
Conclusions
Results indicate that genetic overlap between word reading and attention is accounted for by the genetic factors shared with processing speed. This provides evidence at the genetic level that processing speed may underlie the comorbidity between RD and ADHD.
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Joseph Betts (Renaissance Learning, Inc.); McBride, James - Investigating the Measurement Equivalence and Construct Validity of Tests of Early Reading Skills
Purpose
Many tests presently available for assessing early reading skills have different test blueprints, e.g. varied item content and response format. This research sought to evaluate the evidence of construct validity of four assessments of early reading skills on phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.
Methods
First (N = 198) and second (N = 201) grade students were assessed in a counterbalanced manner on STAR Early Literacy (SEL), Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy (DIBELS), Texas Primary Reading Inventory (TPRI), and Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation (GRADE). Confirmatory factor analysis with nested hypothesis testing was used to evaluate measurement equivalence and construct validity.
Results
Results indicated that the subtests intended to measure a common construct conformed to the hypothesized common factor model for all domains at both grades. Differences between subtest scaling and reliability within a common domain were found. Differences between maturational levels were also found in the underlying measurement model.
Conclusion
These results suggest that these tests of early reading skills might have different blueprints, but appear to measure a common construct. Differences in scaling and reliability of subtests should provide researchers and educators with important considerations when choosing assessments for an intended use.
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Gina Biancarosa (Stanford University); Joshua Lawrence; Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez; Catherine Snow - Passage effects on oral reading fluency: A Rasch analysis of middle grade DIBELS results
Purpose. Passage vocabulary and topic inevitably affect reading speed and accuracy, but current fluency measurement either ignores the issue (single passage administrations) or evades it (median of multiple passage administrations). This study explores whether equating passages and the use of different metrics control for passage differences more effectively than traditional methods by comparing how scaling affects the fluency-comprehension relationship.
Method. About 500 U.S. grade 5-8 students read 2-4 sixth-grade DIBELS oral reading fluency passages at three different times and took the GRADE reading achievement test twice. Four fluency metrics are examined: words-per-minute (wpm) and percent accuracy (accuracy) versus correct-words-per minute (cwpm), and errors-per-minute (epm). We use Rasch modeling to equate the passages and derive person measures, and with the latter predict comprehension using HLM.
Results. Expository passages are more difficult than narrative passages and that passages also vary in difficulty within genre. Although cwpm is consistently more difficult than wpm, the difference varies by and within genre. Raw counts of errors (epm) appear to yield additional information beyond accuracy, especially among faster readers. Fluency-comprehension relationship investigations are ongoing.
Conclusions. Differences between individual passages and metrics lead to questions about the use of cwpm for progress-monitoring and screening of intermediate students.
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Jay Blanchard (Arizona State University); Atwill, Kim; Hisrich, Katy - The influence of L1 language proficiency in cross-language transfer: A four-year longitudinal study in L2 immersion-only classrooms (kindergarten-3rd grade)
Purpose. To study the influence of language proficiency on cross-language transfer of L1 (Spanish) language skills to L2 (English) language and literacy skills in L2 immersion-only classrooms.
Method. Eighty kindergarteners were randonmly selected from a pool of L1 Spanish-speaking children with minimal L2 proficiency. Children were then tracked and assessed multiple times during their kindergarten thru 3rd grade years on L1 and L2 language and literacy skills. Descriptive, inferential and regressive techniques were used to analyze the data across the four years of the study.
Results. Spanish-speaking children with limited L1 proficiency (receptive vocabulary) failed to keep pace with their L1 proficient peers in L2 language and literacy acquisition at all grade levels.
Conclusions. The study results indicated that language proficiency in L1 will influence the development of L2 proficiency (Cummins-Developmental Interdependence Model). Thus bilingualism is not a homogeneous characteristic. If policy-makers assume that cross-language transfer will aid L1 to L2 language and literacy acquisition in young children, L2 immersion-only classrooms may not deliver on that assumption.
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Bart Boets (Centre for Parenting, Child Welfare and Disabilities; K.U.Leuven; Belgium)Vandermosten, Maaike; Wouters, Jan; Ghesquière, Pol - Dyslexia as an auditory temporal processing deficit!? Results from a longitudinal study.
Purpose: The auditory temporal processing theory postulates that dyslexia results from a deficit in the processing of auditory temporal stimuli. This basic deficit is hypothesized to hamper accurate speech perception, hence disrupting subsequent development of adequate phonological representations and literacy skills. The present longitudinal study aimed to verify the presence of these postulated deficits and causal relations.
Methods: 31 children with a family history of dyslexia and 31 matched low-risk controls were followed up from preschool to third grade. Low-level auditory processing, speech-in-noise perception, categorical perception, phonological ability and reading and spelling were assessed at various time moments.
Results: A preliminary analysis where children were categorized in groups based on family-risk status and first-grade literacy achievement, indicated that those children showing both the family-risk and the literacy-impairment presented preschool deficits in FM-detection, speech-in-noise perception, phonological awareness and rapid automatic naming. Investigation of the relations further indicated that auditory processing was related to speech perception, which itself was related to phonological awareness and first-grade literacy development. In the current presentation, we will further elaborate these data by analyzing groups based on formal third-grade dyslexia diagnoses, and by modeling longitudinal relations using causal path analysis.
Conclusions: This longitudinal study indicates that the auditory deficit generally precedes and predicts the literacy problem.
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DJ Bolger (School of Communication, Northwest University); Chin-Lung Yang; Charles Perfetti - Learning the Meanings of Words from Contexts and Definitions: ERP evidence
Purpose: We conducted an ERP experiment on the learning of word meanings by context and definition aimed at two related hypotheses: (1) A word is better integrated into the meaning of a sentence when it is learned through sentence contexts rather than definitions. (2) Integration is also affected by variation in sentence contexts.
Method: Adults learned the meaning of unfamiliar words by reading sentences that contained the word or a definition. Sentence contexts were repeated or varied over 4 occurrences. Following learning, participants read sentences that contained a key word, either one they had learned or a matched control word, and judged whether the sentence made sense.
Results: The N400, an index of word-to context integration, was reduced when a learned word made sense. However, this reduction was greatest for words that had been experienced in context, and reliably smaller for words experienced in definitions. The N400 was also reduced more following 4 varied sentence contexts than a single repeated context.
Conclusions: The results provide clear evidence for both hypotheses. The advantage for learning word meaning from contexts is explained by the convergence of meaning features across various sentences, which allows stronger overlap of episodic memory traces. A similar explanation holds for the positive effect of context variability.
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Anna Bosman (Radboud University Nijmegen) - How to teach children reading and spelling
Recent research revealed that about three-quarters of students in special education in the Netherlands develop a substantial reading delay (van Bon, Bouwens & Broeders, 2006). These reading problems are primarily due to the quality of instruction (Vernooy, 2004, 2006). The aim of the methodology “How to teach children reading and spelling” (HTCRS; Schraven, 2004) is to improve teachers’ quality of instruction. In the present research, the effectiveness of HTCRS was tested. During the school year 2006-2007, the development of reading and spelling skills of students in Grade 1 who attended schools for special education was investigated. Three schools participated and in one school HTCRS was used. At the start of the school year, reading and spelling skills of the three schools did not differ. At the end of Grade 1, reading and spelling skills of the students who were taught with HTCRS were substantially and significantly better than those of students in schools that did not use the methodology. More importantly, the reading skills of the HTCRS-students were similar to those of students in regular education, and the spelling skills were even better. The reading and spelling skills of the two other schools were at the national level for students in special education. The conclusion is warranted that HTCRS is also effective for students in special education. In my talk, I will explain what makes HTCRS exceptionally effective.
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Peter Bowers (Queen's University)Kirby, John - Structured Word Inquiry: Generative vocabulary instruction by teaching morphological structure
Abstract: Purpose
This poster reports on a Grade 4/5 intervention (N=84) that investigated whether morphological instruction in the regular classroom affects morphological knowledge and/or vocabulary learning after controlling for initial vocabulary knowledge.
Method
Participants completed a standardized vocabulary pre-test measure and were randomly assigned by classroom to treatment and control conditions. Treatment consisted of twenty 50-minute classroom sessions addressing the building-block nature of morphemes (bases and affixes) that use consistent spelling despite pronunciation shifts (e.g. sign / signal). The three suffixing patterns, and the role of base words and bound bases (e.g. struct for structure) were taught through a problem-solving approach while the control group continued with regular instruction. Post-tests included measures of written morphological analysis and vocabulary.
Results
Hierarchical regression analyses controlling for initial vocabulary showed significant instructional effects on morphological analysis and vocabulary knowledge with words that were taught directly and novel words built on bases that were taught in the context of other derivations. No effect was found for words with an untaught base.
Conclusions
A short morphological intervention in the regular classroom setting was able to build word structure knowledge and vocabulary knowledge for words that were not directly taught.
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Lisa Boyce (Utah State University); Mark Innocenti; Kim D'zatko - The Enduring Effects of Early Impacts on the Home Environment: An Examination of Latino Children’s School Readiness Skills.
Purpose: We examined the influence of the home environment on the school readiness skills of young Latino children living in poverty.
Method: A quasi-experimental design was used to assess the impacts of a school readiness intervention program comprised of home visiting (birth to 3) and preschool (ages 3-5) components.
Results: A baseline model confirmed the direct effects of the intervention (the home language/literacy environment) and two environmental variables (mother’s vocabulary and family income) at 36 months on children’s later pre-k language, emergent literacy, and social skill outcomes.
Two mediation models were tested to examine the indirect effect of the home language/literacy environment on pre-K outcomes: 1) at 36 months and 2) sustained through pre-k. The first model exhibited excellent fit as well as significant indirect paths to all pre-k child outcomes. The second model demonstrated a sustained effect of the intervention through pre-k on only one of four measured school-readiness variables and exhibited only adequate fit.
Conclusion: The major impact of the home language/literacy environment on these Latino children’s school readiness outcomes occurs before 36 months. Intervention focused on the home environment before age 3 is important to later success. Intervention resources need to be invested earlier rather than later.
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Lee Branum-Martin (University of Houston); Carlson, Coleen; Durand, Angelia - Growth in Reading Tasks Predicting Reading Achievement for Students and Campuses in English and Spanish
Purpose — How does growth in reading skills such as fluency, word reading, and comprehension relate to end of year reading achievement in English and Spanish? To what extent do schools differ in these and what might that suggest about instructional and administrative effectiveness?
Method — 771 Texas campuses provided data for 103,763 third grade students in growth tasks and reading performance in English and Spanish. The task data consisted of the Texas Primary Reading Inventory and the Tejas LEE: including reading fluency, word reading, and comprehension. For each task, a multilevel (students within schools) 3-time linear growth model was fit in order to predict end of year performance on the state reading proficiency exam.
Results — The percentage of variability at the campus level was 7-10% English, and 10-24% in Spanish. In both languages, initial task status was more highly related to final achievement (r = .28 - .63) than was task growth (r = 0 - .35). Where significant, growth in component tasks was additionally helpful for achievement.
Conclusions — While individual student ability and growth are important to achievement, there is substantial variability between campuses in both their growth and achievement rates. Instruction and other campus differences suggest further investigation.
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Kathleen Brown (University of Utah Reading Clinic); Fields, Matthew K.; Morris, Darrell; Craig, Grace - Basic Intervention for Struggling Readers: Preserving the Power of 1-on-1 in a Triad
Purpose: investigate the following question: Do struggling readers tutored in a one-on-one intervention format outperform their peers who receive similar intervention in a triad format (group of three)?
Method: 125 struggling readers from 13 public schools, assessed as reading between mid-1st and end-2nd grades levels, were randomly assigned to an intervention format (1-on-1 or triad). Students in both formats averaged approximately 43 sessions over one school year. Intervention session time and content were held constant across formats and included assisted reading, word study, and fluency work. Each educator (15 certified teachers and 17 para-educators) had completed one full-year intervention practicum, and participated in another during the current study. Each educator worked with one singleton and one triad to control for teacher effects. The triad structure included rotating a “target student” for each session to provide a facsimile of 1-on-1. Pre-post data were collected for each student on norm-referenced and criterion-referenced measures: Woodcock Passage Reading, Woodcock Word Attack, and research-validated informal passage reading, word recognition automaticity, and spelling inventories.
Results: HLM analysis using student data, tutor, and school as the level 1, 2, and 3 variables respectively, found significant differences in only one performance measure: Woodcock Passage Reading (comprehension).
Conclusions: The extant literature provides few empirical investigations of the impact of group size on reading intervention effectiveness. In fact, a meta-analysis by Elbaum et al., (2000) identified only 2 studies (unpublished doctoral dissertations) that addressed this issue. The current study suggests that a triad format may approach a 1-on-1 tutorial in effectiveness. Contributions to this finding may have included the intensive professional development provided and a structure that prioritized regular, intensive work with a target student in the triad.
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Stephen Burgess (Department of Psychology) - The home literacy environments provided to very young children
Purpose
The preschool home literacy environment (HLE) has been linked to the development of a variety of literacy and oral language skills (e.g., Phillips & Lonigan, 2005). Most research in this area has examined older preschoolers. The origins and development of the HLE have not been extensively explored. We examined the HLE provided to very young preschoolers.
Method
HLE surveys (e.g., literacy activities with child, parental leisure reading habits) and adult and children’s author recognition checklists were obtained from 262 mothers of children less than 19 months old.
Results
The children were exposed to a wide range of literacy activities and experiences, but many had relatively little literacy exposure. Shared reading was the most common literacy activity. Few children were exposed to activities specifically intended to teach literacy knowledge or skill, but approximately 15% of the older children were regularly taught using alphabet letter blocks or other techniques. Maternal reading habits and estimated reading ability were associated with the provision of more frequent and varied literacy experiences.
Conclusions
We demonstrated that differences in HLE activities and resources provided to preschoolers may begin at very young ages. Differences in HLE provision were related to parental ability, beliefs, and reading habits.
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Tyran Butler ();Fenty, Nicole; Lane, Holly; Miller, Melissa - Vocabulary and Comprehension with Children in Primary Grades: A Comparison of Instructional Strategies
Purpose-To examine the effects of vocabulary-focused instruction and strategies-focused instruction on the vocabulary development and comprehension skills of students in primary grades who are adequate decoders, but non-proficient comprehenders of text.
Methods- Using a pretest-posttest design, primary grade students (N=60), randomly assigned to two groups, received 32 sessions over eight weeks, of either vocabulary-focused instruction or strategies-focused instruction. Pretest and posttest data were collected using measures of expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Data were analyzed using a series of analyses of covariance with the pretests as covariates. Within and between group analyses were conducted.
Results-A series of analyses of covariance revealed no statistically significant differences between groups on measures of vocabulary and comprehension. An analysis of covariance revealed a statistically significant difference between groups on a passage comprehension measure, favoring the vocabulary-focused group. A series of analyses of covariance revealed statistically significant differences within groups on measures of vocabulary and comprehension.
Conclusion- Explicit vocabulary instruction and comprehension strategies instruction have a significant impact on both the reading comprehension and vocabulary of children in primary grades. With a more experienced adult or peer providing scaffolding, students’ abilities can be expanded beyond what they are able to do alone.
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Sonia Cabell (University of Virginia); Justice, Laura; Konold, Timothy; McGinty, Anita - Profiles of Emergent Literacy among Preschool Children Who Are at Risk for Academic Difficulties
Purpose
The purpose of this study was to explore patterns of within-group variability in the emergent literacy skills of preschoolers at risk for academic difficulties. We used the person-oriented approach of cluster analysis to identify a normative taxonomy of the most common profiles of emergent literacy (i.e., oral language and code-related skills). We then examined the extent to which teacher report of emergent literacy differentiated profiles.
Methods
Participants were 492 preschoolers enrolled in publicly-funded programs (42-60 months). In the fall, children were administered eight measures of emergent literacy: four oral language measures (i.e., expressive/receptive grammar and vocabulary) and four code-related measures (i.e., alphabet knowledge, name writing, print concepts, rhyme). Controlling for age, hierarchical-agglomerative and K-means cluster analysis procedures were employed. Profiles were then compared on midyear teacher report, using a series of ANOVAs.
Results
Five internally-validated profiles emerged: highest overall (prevalence = 14%); three profiles with average oral language and differential code-related abilities (16%, 24%; 23%); and lowest oral language with broad code-related weaknesses (23%). Teacher report provided convergent evidence of external validity.
Conclusions
This study highlights the considerable heterogeneity of emergent literacy abilities within an “at-risk” group. Such information may be useful for characterizing intervention responsiveness in young children.
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Kate Cain (Lancaster University) ; Simon Bignell - Reading and listening comprehension and their relation to inattention and hyperactivity
Purpose: Children with inattention and hyperactivity frequently have poor reading and language comprehension. We sought to determine whether inattention or hyperactivity make separate contributions to reading and listening comprehension.
Method: In Study One, we explored the relations between teacher ratings of inattention and hyperactivity and word reading and reading comprehension in 8-11 year-olds. In Study Two, we compared reading and listening comprehension in three experimental groups selected for either high levels of inattention, or hyperactivity, or both. Their performance was compared with controls with age-appropriate levels of attention and (hyper)activity.
Results: In Study One we found a strong relation between attention and both word reading and reading comprehension. Attention explained a small but unique proportion of variance in reading comprehension after word reading had been controlled. There was no evidence that (hyper)activity was related to reading. In Study Two, the hyperactive-only group did not perform more poorly than controls overall, but all three experimental groups obtained lower scores for listening than reading comprehension; the controls did not show this pattern of performance.
Conclusions: Reading comprehension deficits in children with inattention are partly independent of word reading skill; children with inattention and hyperactivity are at risk of listening comprehension failure.
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Mary Beth Calhoon (Georgia State University) - Rescheduling the Instructional Sequencing of Reading Sub-Skills to Maximize Older Students with Reading Disabilities Response to Remedial Reading Intervention
PURPOSE
Adolescents (6th-8th grades) are in dire need of research based reading instruction designed specifically for their unique needs. While research has answered many question concerning specific instructional techniques necessary for the remediation of each sub-skill, it has not provided enough information concerning the most effective way to sequence and balance the instruction of each sub-skill to maximize responsiveness to instruction.
METHOD
The purpose of this study was to explore the best way to organize the instructional sequencing of the reading sub-skills to maximize adolescent’s (N = 90) responsiveness to instruction. Nine classrooms were randomly assigned to three different sub-skill instructional schedules; a) Alternating (ALT), b) Integrated (ISS), and c) Sequential (SSS). All instruction occurred five days a week, 45 minutes a day for 25 weeks for a total of 97 hours of reading instruction. The reading sub-tests of the Woodcock-Johnson-Revised, the Gray Silent Reading Test, and ORF passages were used to assess gains.
RESULTS
Results demonstrated the SSS schedule significantly outperformed the ALT and ISS schedules in decoding, spelling and comprehension skill acquisition. The reading fluency assessments showed differing results between schedules.
CONCLUSIONS
Findings are discussed in regards to optimal instructional sequencing of reading sub-skills to maximize responsiveness to instruction for adolescents.
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Angel Canto (Florida State University);Connor, Carol; Rice, Diana - Science Instruction Enhances Literacy Development in Second Grade
Purpose - To investigate whether student gains in reading and background knowledge related to specific types of science instruction and whether these effects depended upon students’ initial language, literacy, and background knowledge skills (i.e., child-by-instruction interactions).
Method - 88 second grade students in six schools, 33 classrooms of an urban Midwest school district participated in this study. Classrooms were formally observed three times per year (fall, winter, and spring). Children’s language, literacy, and general academic knowledge were assessed in the fall and again in spring.
Results - On average, teachers spent 92.4 minutes/day in language arts instruction (range 52.7 to 154.7 minutes/day) and 10.94 minutes/day in science instruction (range 0 to 75 minutes/day). Science instruction promoted rather than inhibited literacy skill growth for most students; however, the effect depended on students’ fall vocabulary, reading, and background knowledge skills. Specific types of science instruction were associated with greater growth in children’s reading, vocabulary, and background knowledge with child-by-instruction interaction effects.
Conclusions - Results highlight the opportunity for even greater gains when instruction is individualized for students with respect to their current academic skills and knowledge. Data from this year’s Individualizing Science Instruction pilot study will also be presented.
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Kameron Carden (University of Florida)Johnson, Bonnie; King, Wayne; Lombardino, Linda - Language and Emergent Literacy Skills in Preschoolers with Early Cochlear Implantation
Purpose: The present study examined spoken language and emergent literacy skills in preschool children with cochlear implants.
Method: Fourteen preschoolers, who received cochlear implants between 12 and 27 months, participated in the study. They were ages 48-59 months (5 female, 9 male). Children were administered six subtests of the Assessment of Language and Literacy (ALL): letter knowledge, rhyme knowledge, basic concepts, receptive vocabulary, parallel sentence production, and listening comprehension. Their scores were compared to those of 14 typically developing preschoolers from the ALL normative sample, matched for age, gender, SES, grade, ethnicity, and region of the country.
Results: As a group, the children with cochlear implants performed more poorly than the children with typical language on the language composite but not on the emergent literacy composite. Letter knowledge was age-appropriate for most of the children with cochlear implants. In contrast, over 40% of the children with cochlear implants scored in the clinical range for rhyme knowledge (-1.5 SD).
Conclusions: Rhyme knowledge, in addition to spoken language skills, should be explicitly taught to preschoolers with cochlear implants in order to secure a foundation for later reading development.
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Joanne Carlisle (University of Michigan); Rowan, Bran; Kelcey, Ben - Does elementary teachers’ knowledge about reading contribute to their students’ gains in reading achievement?
The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which early elementary teachers’ knowledge about reading contributed to their students’ gains in word analysis and reading comprehension across a year.
Method:
The data were derived from the Reading First program in Michigan, through which high poverty, low achieving schools received funding to support improvement of early reading instruction. The 954 participating teachers instructed 17,703 students and were nested in 140 schools. Reading achievement for grade 1-3 students included fall DIBELS and spring subtest from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Teacher data were collected from a survey that included teacher information, an assessment of their knowledge about reading (Language and Reading Concepts, LRC) and a self-reported survey of practices. School-level data came from the Michigan Department of Education.
Results:
We stratified teachers on the basis of their propensity to have high/low teacher knowledge and modeled the effect of knowledge on student achievement through six (two per grade) three-level hierarchical linear models. Our analyses revealed significant evidence that teacher knowledge affected students’ reading achievement. We found small but statistically significant effect sizes in both first grade subtests and in second grade for word analysis. A slightly smaller and statistically insignificant teacher knowledge effect on the grade two reading comprehension emerged. In grade three we found no evidence of an effect of teacher knowledge on the reading subtests. Fall measures of prior reading ability from DIBELS showed the strongest relationship to both outcomes in all grades. Students’ race, economic status, and disability status played prominent roles in predicting both outcomes in all three grades.
Conclusion:
Teacher knowledge was linked to student growth on both ITBS subtests (word analysis and reading comprehension) in grades one and two. Third grade results are probably affected by the content of the teacher knowledge measure, which placed greater emphasis on decoding than comprehension.
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Julia Carroll (University of Warwick);Myers, Joanne - Literacy, language and speech processing: What are the links?
Purpose
There is substantial evidence suggesting an overlap between speech difficulties and literacy difficulties. The present study aims to elucidate the nature of this relationship by comparing four different groups of 4-6 year old children with: speech difficulties; a dyslexic relative; low nonword repetition; or no difficulties.
Method
Data collection is ongoing: currently there are 58 typically developing children and 47 children in total in the three risk groups. Ten of the twenty-six children with a family history of dyslexia (38.5%) had also received speech therapy, confirming a substantial overlap between groups. The children have completed a full battery of tasks measuring speech, language, literacy and phonological processing. They will be retested six months later to provide a measure of progress in literacy.
Results
The risk groups differ from controls in terms of their literacy, phoneme awareness, speech accuracy and language development. They also showed differences on tasks aimed at measuring phonological processing: nonsense word learning, mispronunciation detection and word classification.
We will assess which of the measures at time 1 predicts poor literacy progress, and could perhaps be used as markers for possible future literacy difficulties.
Conclusions
This research will provide information as to the aspects of speech and language development which are most important for literacy development.
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Kelly Cartwright (Christopher Newport University); Coppage, Elizabeth; Guiffre, Heather; Scarano, Kathleen - A Comparison of Metacognitive Skills and Cognitive Flexibility in Good and Poor Comprehenders
Purpose: Metacognitive skills and cognitive flexibility (an aspect of executive control that involves the ability to coordinate flexibly multiple features of tasks) contribute uniquely to comprehension (Author, 2002, 2007; Nagy, 2007). Good and poor comprehenders exhibit significantly different profiles of cognitive abilities (Yuill & Oakhill, 1991). This study was designed to extend this work and examine metacognitive abilities and cognitive flexibility in good and poor comprehenders.
Method: Sixty-five university students completed the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test (WRMT) Passage Comprehension subtest to assess comprehension, WRMT Word Attack to assess decoding ability, WRMT Word Identification to assess word reading, Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test Verbal Subscale, measures of syntactic and phonemic awareness, and two measures of cognitive flexibility, graphophonological-semantic and semantic-syntactic, to assess participants’ ability to coordinate flexibly these aspects of print. Twenty four low and 24 high comprehenders were matched on WRMT Word Attack for comparison.
Results: Good and poor comprehenders differed significantly on all measures. Differences in syntactic awareness, phonemic awareness, and both measures of cognitive flexibility remained significant when verbal ability and word identification were controlled.
Conclusion: These data complement existing work by demonstrating additional critical cognitive differences in metacognitive awareness and cognitive flexibility between good and poor comprehenders.
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Xi Chen (University of Toronto)Lam, Katie; Ku, Yu-Min - The role of morphological awareness in vocabulary acquisition among Chinese-English bilinguals
Purpose
This study investigated the role of morphological awareness in vocabulary acquisition among Chinese-English bilinguals.
Methods
Participants included 48 kindergarteners, 34 first graders, 31 second graders, 37 fourth graders and 40 seven graders from a large Canadian city. All the children were of Chinese descent. They received parallel morphological awareness and vocabulary measures in Chinese and English, and a battery of linguistic and cognitive measures in English only.
Result
Regression analyses were carried out in each grade. To predict Chinese vocabulary, Raven and mother’s education were entered in the first step, followed by phonological awareness in the second step, and Chinese morphological awareness in the final step. To predict English vocabulary, the same variables were entered in the first two steps, followed by English morphological awareness. Morphological awareness explained unique variance in Chinese vocabulary in every grade, whereas phonological awareness was not significant. In contrast, phonological awareness predicted English vocabulary in grade two, four, and seven, and English morphological awareness was significant only in grade four and seven.
Conclusion
Our results highlight the importance of morphological awareness in Chinese vocabulary acquisition. Moreover, we demonstrate that the importance of morphological awareness increases with grade level in English.
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Paula Clarke (University of York, UK); Emma Truelove; Charles Hulme; Margaret Snowling - The York READing for MEaning Project: A randomised controlled trial of interventions to improve children’s reading and language comprehension skills
Children with reading comprehension difficulties (poor comprehenders) typically show a wide range of oral language difficulties including weaknesses in semantic and grammatical skills and experience problems with the comprehension of both oral and written language. We report the results of a randomised controlled trial evaluating three theoretically motivated interventions designed to improve the reading and oral language comprehension skills of poor comprehenders. Children (n = 160) who were identified with poor reading comprehension skills in relation to their decoding ability were selected for inclusion in the study and randomly allocated to one of four groups, each of whom received instruction over two 10-week blocks: oral language training (OL), text comprehension training (TC), combined oral language and text comprehension training (COM) and a delayed treatment control (C). The OL training consisted of activities designed to improve vocabulary, listening comprehension, figurative language and spoken narrative and the TC training included activities to target metacognitive strategy use, reading comprehension, inferencing from text and written narrative. The COM training used a combination of all of the activities in the OL and TC programs. Our results show positive effects of the interventions on a range of measures of oral language and reading comprehension.
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Leen Cleuren (Centre for Parenting, Child Welfare and Disabilities - K.U.Leuven); Kong, Yuk On; Latacz, Lukas; Verhelst, Werner; Ghesquière, Pol - Evaluation of a Speech Synthesis Based Reading Tutor to Speed up Reading in Poor Readers
Purpose. Within the SPACE project, a fully automated Dutch reading tutor, able to (1) track the child’s reading progress and detect reading errors precisely by means of a speech recognizer; and (2) act as a fluent reading model and give adequate feedback by means of a speech synthesizer, is being developed. In order to explore the effectiveness of this tutor to improve a child’s reading accuracy and fluency, an intervention study was carried out.
Method. A pretest/posttest 4-week treatment with control group (no treatment) design was used. 10 pairs of reading disabled Flemish regular school children (grade 2-6) participated. Treatment consisted of non-repetitive reading sessions where the child could ask for phonic analysis help. When a child made an error but proceeded without asking for help, the speech synthesizer prompted phonic analysis feedback to the child in order to prevent the child from moving on before sounding out the word correctly.
Results and Conclusions. In this paper we will discuss the effectiveness of the reading tutor mediated intervention sessions by comparing pre- and posttest reading skills for the experimental versus the control group. We will also have a closer look at how reading accuracy and fluency gradually improves with each reading session.
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Joanne Cocksey (University of Oxford)Angell, Philip; Taylor, Joanne; Nation, Kate - The early language abilities of poor comprehenders: a prospective study.
Purpose: Research has shown that some children with specific reading comprehension difficulties have concomitant impairments in listening comprehension and weaknesses in dealing with the non-phonological aspects of language processing. This longitudinal prospective study aims to investigate the hypothesis that weak oral language skills early in development may be a risk factor for children who go on to have specific reading comprehension difficulties in mid-childhood.
Method: 250 children were recruited at age 4.5 years. Their cognitive, language and literacy skills were assessed at 4 time points over a 3-year period. 19 poor comprehenders and 19 control children, matched for age, nonverbal IQ and decoding, were selected at time 4 when the children were 7.5 years old. We examined and compared the early language abilities of these two groups.
Results: The results support the hypothesis and indicate that the poor comprehenders who emerged at time 4 had a history of weaker non-phonological language abilities. There was also evidence to suggest that poor comprehenders had weaker pre-literacy skills than control children..
Conclusions: This study contributes to our understanding of what the early precursors or risk factors may be for children who go on to have specific difficulties with reading comprehension. The results also have implications for interventions for poor comprehenders.
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Chris Coleman (UGA Regents' Center for Learning Disorders); Gregg, Noel; Lindstrom, Jennifer; Lindstrom, Will - Passageless Comprehension of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test
The comprehension section of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test (NDRT; Brown, Fishco, & Hanna, 1993) is widely used to assess the reading comprehension skills of U.S. adolescents and adults. For example, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC) identifies the NDRT (Form G or H) as the “preferred measure” of reading comprehension for documentation of cognitive impairments (e.g., dyslexia) in students hoping to take the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) with accommodations (www.lsac.org). But is the NDRT a valid measure of reading comprehension? In the present study, we explored this question by asking normally-achieving university students (n=115) to answer the NDRT (Form G) multiple-choice comprehension questions without reading the passages. Overall accuracy rates were well above chance, and the students were particularly successful with inferential questions. These results raise serious validity concerns about the NDRT, which may be measuring verbal abilities (e.g., background knowledge; reasoning) rather than the intended construct.
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Molly F. Collins (Erikson Institute, Chicago, VS) - Home Reading Practices of Portuguese ELL Preschoolers
Purpose
This study explores the frequency and language of home reading practices of ELL preschoolers within a larger study on English vocabulary acquisition from storybook reading. It examines whether the frequency of home reading supports target word learning from storybook reading and how the language of home reading contributes to baseline L1 and L2 vocabulary.
Method
Seventy, 4-and 5-year-old speakers of Portuguese (L1) who were learning English (L2) were pretested in L1 and L2 receptive vocabulary, assigned to groups, and read stories with target vocabulary. Parents completed questionnaires about the content, frequency, and language(s) of home reading.
Results
Frequency per week of reading at home was a significant predictor of variance in target word learning. Children who were read to in Portuguese only had significantly higher baseline L1 scores than those read to in both languages or English only. Children who were read to in English only had significantly higher baseline L2 scores than those read to in both languages or Portuguese only.
Conclusions
The frequency of home reading helps L2 learning. Reading in a single language contributes significantly to children's vocabulary in that language. Findings are helpful for understanding how home practices support first and second language vocabulary learning.
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Penny Collins (University of California, Irvine);Kemp, Susan - Predictors of Third Grade Reading Comprehension Among English Learners and Native English Speakers
Predictors of Third Grade Reading Comprehension Among English Learners and Native English Speakers
This study examines the contributions of word reading, vocabulary, reading-related skills and reading related behaviors to third grade students' performance in reading comprehension. 186 third grade students from three suburban schools participated, which consisted of 126 native English speakers and 42 students who were English learners. At the beginning of the school year, students were administered standardized tests of reading fluency, reading comprehension, and vocabulary, in addition to measures of phonological awareness, morphological awareness, orthographic processing, and print exposure. The presentation will focus on an examination of (a) whether the relationships between basic reading processes and reading comprehension differ for native English speakers and English learners, and (b) whether the relationships between these skills and reading comprehension varies as a function of proficiency in English (as determined by the California English Language Development Test) among English learners. The generalizability of models of reading comprehension that have been developed within one's L1 to students who are learning to reading in their L2 will be discussed.
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Don Compton (Vanderbilt University)Doug Fuchs; Lynn Fuchs - Dynamic Assessment of Decoding as a Predictor of Future Reading Skill in Developing Readers
We assessed the value of Decoding Dynamic Assessment in predicting reading outcomes 12 weeks later in 105 1st graders. Children we pretested, progress monitored with Word Identification Fluency (WIF), and posttested. Pretest DA correlated significantly with pretest Word ID (r=.65) and Word Attack (r=.78). DA, WIF intercept, and WIF slope were significant predictors of posttest Word ID, Word Attack, and passage fluency, explaining 73%, 66%, and 76% of variance, respectively. After controlling for WIF growth, DA explained 12%, 20%, and 2% unique variance of Word ID, Word Attack, and passage fluency, indicating potential for DA as a predictor of learning to read in first grade.
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Carol McDonald Connor (Florida State University and the Florida Center for Reading Research)Morrison, Frederick J.; Fishman, Barry; Schatschneider, Christopher; Underwood, Phyllis; Crowe, Elizabeth - Individualizing Student Instruction in Two Studies: Technology, Instruction and First Graders’ Literacy Outcomes
Purpose: Investigating the effect of child X instruction interactions on first graders’ literacy outcomes, we focus on the results of the second of two randomized control field trials conducted during the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years. In both studies, we examined teachers’ use of Assessment-to-instruction (A2i) software, instruction in the classroom, and compared technology use for teachers who implemented individualized instruction with greater or lesser fidelity.
Method: Ethnically/socioeconomically diverse schools were matched and randomly assigned to intervention or control conditions (n=10 & 7 schools, 46 & 26 teachers and 651 & 443 students in Studies 1 & 2 respectively). Intervention teachers used A2i software and received professional development (PD). In year 2, A2i was enhanced to include online PD resources and student-assessment graphs.
Results: Replicating and extending Study 1, Study 2 HLM revealed that students in the intervention classrooms demonstrated significantly greater spring word reading skills compared to students in control classrooms (coefficient=2.99, p=.042, Effect size=.20) controlling for fall scores. There were differences in implementation and technology use within and across the two studies, which affected students’ outcomes.
Conclusions: Elucidating the practices of teachers who showed high levels of fidelity in these studies provide further evidence of the impact of child X instruction interactions.
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Nicole Conrad (Department of Psychology, Saint Mary's University)McNutt, Jennifer - How do I know the spelling of "Orthography"? Designing and validating a measure of orthographic knowledge
Purpose: To design and evaluate a measure of orthographic knowledge. The measurement of orthographic skill has not advanced to the same degree as the measurement of other reading related skills, such as phonological skills.
Method: To address some of the concerns with existing measures of orthographic skill (see Hagiliassis, Pratt, & Johnston, 2006), a new measure was constructed, using nonword pairs that sound similar but differ in terms of the frequency of the letter combinations (e.g., tays – tayz). Using both accuracy and response times, reliability analyses were conducted for both adult and child readers. To examine validity, performance was compared to performance on two “gold standard” measures of orthographic skill: the Orthographic Choice Task, which measures word specific orthographic knowledge, and the Word-likeness Task, which measures knowledge of graphotactic regularities. To further examine both convergent and divergent validity, a variety of measures of related domains, including reading, spelling, math, morphology, and phonological skill were also administered.
Results: Evidence was found for both the reliability and validity of this measure.
Conclusions: This measure of orthographic knowledge may measure orthographic knowledge with a greater degree of purity than previous measures, and contributes to our ability to measure and understand this core component of skilled reading
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Pierre Cormier (Universite de Moncton); Doucet, Danielle; & Desrochers, Alain - Lexicality effects in phoneme elision tasks are resistant to working memory control
Purpose. This study follows up on Cormier and Desrochers (2007) who found that children take away more easily a phoneme from a stimulus word when the answer is a word than when it is a pseudoword. It had two objectives: to examine (a) whether this effect can be found in all types of phonemic elision tasks and whether (b) individual differences in working memory moderate it.
Method. Children in grades 1, 3 and 5 (n = 112) did eight phoneme elision tasks (ten items each) in one of two lists: one in which the response was a word and another in which it was a pseudoword. The position of the target phoneme (e.g., beginning and end of CVC words, first and second position of CCVC words, etc.) varied across tasks. Children also performed a working memory task in which they repeated the last words in sets of sentences.
Results. The word advantage was significant in all phoneme elision tasks, 3.61 < F’s (1, 102) < 20.52, .06 > p’s < .001, .03 < η2‘s < .17, except (C)VC and CV/C(C)V tasks, and after having controlled for the significant effects of working memory, 12.92 < F’s (1, 102) < 81.14, all p’s < .001, .10 < η2‘s < .45.
Conclusion. This word advantage, a lexicality effect, in phoneme elision tasks raises questions about the nature of the relationship between phoneme elision and word decoding in school aged children.
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Piers Cornelissen (Department of Psychology, University of York, UK)Hansen, Peter; Kringelback, Morten; Whitney, Carol; Holliday, Ian - Early activation in Broca’s area during visual word recognition: evidence from MEG
Purpose: Recent neurophysiological evidence has suggested that the interaction between visual and speech areas starts very early (~130ms) during visual word recognition (e.g. Pammer et al., 2004). Here we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to seek evidence for early activation of posterior superior IFG (Broca’s area) in response to visually presented words.
Method. Participants continuously monitored and responded to any colour change in a fixation cross while faces and 5-letter strings were presented centrally. We used synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) to calculate the timeseries in six regions of interest: left and right middle occipital gyrus (MOG), left IFG (pars opercularis) and its RH homologue, and the visual word form area in the left mid-fusiform gyrus (VWFA) and its RH homologue. We carried out frequency and amplitude domain analyses on the resultant data.
Results: We found that strings, but not faces, activated the posterior superior inferior frontal / precentral gyrus at the same time as the VWFA. This frontal response was significantly greater for words than for consonant strings.
Conclusions: These findings confirm very early interaction between the vision and language domains during visual word recognition. The implications for neurobiological models of orthographic processing will be discussed.
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Kathleen Corriveau (Harvard Graduate School of Education, USA); Jennifer Thomson - Rhythm assessment as a tool for evaluating early reading skills
Purpose: This research investigates the use of rhythm assessment as a tool for evaluating pre-reading ability in young children. The study also examines the ability of rhythm skills to predict reading ability in early readers.
Method: Sixty children aged 3-6 have been followed longitudinally. The group was assessed using standardized measures of phonological awareness (PIPA, CTOPP), vocabulary (PPVT), spelling (PALS), intelligence (KBIT-2), and reading (Word-ID, Word-Attack). Both children’s receptive rhythm ability (discriminating between two ‘beats’) and expressive rhythm ability (tapping in time to a beat) have also been examined.
Results: We report results from the first 3 timepoints of the study (2 academic years). Both receptive rhythm and expressive rhythm show associations with children’s rhyming ability, predicting approximately 50% of the variance. Letter-sound awareness is strongly associated with other phonemic awareness measures. As children begin to read, both letter-sound awareness and rhythm predict separate amounts of variance. Thus, both rhythm awareness and letter-sound awareness are important – but separable -- predictors of reading readiness.
Conclusions: These results suggest rhythm can be used as an early predictor of reading ability. We anticipate that this could help to identify children at risk for reading difficulties before they even begin to fail.
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Michael Coyne (University of Connecticut); Deborah C. Simmons; Shanna Hagan-Burke; Oiman Kwok; Athena Lentini - Early Intervention in the Real World: An Experimental Evaluation of the Early Reading Intervention Program
This presentation will describe a program of research dedicated to evaluating the efficacy of a kindergarten beginning reading intervention designed to help children at risk for reading disability establish critical phonemic and alphabetic skills. An 8-month randomized control trial with 57 school-based interventionists and 209 kindergarten students was conducted in Texas and Connecticut. Screening measures of letter knowledge and phonological awareness were used identify the four most at risk students from each kindergarten classroom at participating schools. Each group of four was randomly assigned to implement wither the experimental intervention or school designed intervention. Both treatment and comparison groups met for 30 minutes per day for approximately 130 days. Initial results suggest statistically and educationally significant benefits of the intervention on phonologic, word attack, and spelling measures. Findings will be discussed in the context of conducting large scale research studies in real world settings and scaling up early intervention efforts.
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Holly K. Craig (University of Michigan);Zhang, Lingling; Hensel, Stephanie - The Contribution of Dialect-shifting to Reading Achievement for African American English-speaking Students
Purpose: This study examined relationships between dialect shifting toward Standard American English and reading achievement for African American English (AAE) speaking students. Dialect shifting was determined by comparing feature production rates during generation of an oral and a written narrative. It was hypothesized that rates in the oral narrative task would bear no direct relationship to standardized reading scores whereas rates in writing would be lower, and would be inversely related to reading outcomes.
Method: Participants were 165 typically-developing African American first-fifth graders. Measures of feature production rates (dialect density; DDM) during oral and written narratives and of receptive and expressive vocabulary and sentence structure were collected and examined for relationships to standardized reading scores using Structural Equation Modeling.
Results: DDMs decreased significantly between the oral and written narratives providing strong evidence of dialect shifting. The other oral language measures clustered into a Comprehension and a Production Factor. After controlling for socio-economic status and the two language factors, written DDMs exerted both direct and indirect effects on reading scores whereas oral DDMs exerted only an indirect effect through the Comprehension Factor.
Conclusions: The results indicate that the ability to dialect shift contributes positively to the reading achievement of AAE-speaking students.
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Claudine Crane (University of York);Snowling, M.J; Hulme, C; Carroll, J; Duff, F; Fieldsend, E - Early Intervention at the Foundation of Reading Comprehension: Response of Children with SLI
Purpose - This study investigated the role of language level and non-verbal IQ in children's response to intervention.
Method - 152 children participated in a randomised controlled trial evaluating both a Phonology with Reading programme (n=76) and an Oral Language programme (n=76). Participants with weak oral language skills were selected at school entry. Baseline language scores were then screened and 68 children identified with diffuse language impairments i.e. showing impairments on 2 out of 5 language measures. 29 of these children were further classified as SLI (non-verbal IQ in the normal range). Analyses were carried out looking at a) the outcomes of children with diffuse language difficulties compared to those with less severe difficulties, and b) the outcomes of children with SLI compared to those with a general delay. Outcomes were evaluated using a series of language and literacy measures given immediately after the intervention and after a 6 month delay.
Results - Children with diffuse language difficulties showed poorer oral language outcomes than those with isolated difficulties, although fewer differences were found for literacy outcomes. Children with SLI showed a significant advantage over children with general delay on tests of literacy development but no difference was found for tests of oral language.
Conclusions - These results suggest that response to intervention is mediated by the nature and severity of language impairment and indicate that children with SLI can use general ability to facilitate literacy development.
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Jennifer Cromley (Temple University) - Testing a Model of Motivation, Cognition, and Reading Comprehension in Four Countries
Purpose: We wished to test a popular model of motivation, cognition, and reading comprehension (Greene, Miller, Crowson, Duke, & Akey, 2004) and compare its fit in four countries. We used the large international PISA dataset to compare results: are the effects in the model the same in all four countries?
Method: We used a hierarchical linear modeling to test an a priori model while accounting for the fact that sampled children are nested within schools. Participants were 15-year-old students: n = 2129 from the US, n = 2860 from Australia, n = 2308 from Norway, and n = 2757 from Korea. Materials were the PISA-designed and translated reading comprehension measure (see Chiu, Chow, & McBride-Chang, 2007) and various questions from the PISA motivation questionnaire (see Marsh, Hau, Artelt, Baumert, & Peschar, 2006). These were both theoretically-based, developed by international teams, extensively validated, and show Cronbach’s alpha reliabilities above .85. In our analyses, we tested the effects shown in Greene et al’s (2004) model using regression in HLM, and standardized the results for each country.
Results: Results showed different patterns of effects across the four countries. Some results were surprising—for example, Control Strategies showed very different effects on comprehension across the four countries after accounting for self-concept (effect sizes from .63* to -.05ns). Other results were as predicted, e.g., very large effects for Performance-Approach Goals on Control Strategies in Korea (effect size = 1.38).
Conclusions: Prior research that has been reported as culturally universal may in fact be reporting culturally-specific patterns.
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Virginia Cronin (George Washington University) - Reading Development and Word Association
Purpose: Previous research suggested a relationship between reading development and types of word association responses. Adults respond with more paradigmatic responses, same form responses, and young children give more syntagmatic responses, or words that follow other words in discourse. After reading acquisition children tend to give more paradigmatic responses. The present research examined this relationship with Hierarchical Linear Modeling and Structural Equation Modeling in a longitudinal study.
Method: Some 130 children were tested in preschool and followed through third grade when 97 children remained in the study. They were given the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test, vocabulary tests, and word association tests. The word association responses were assessed as to the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses.
Results: HLM growth trajectories found that paradigmatic responding was significantly related to the Woodcock Word Identification scores, but that syntagmatic responding was not. The growth of paradigmatic responding was not related to vocabulary in kindergarten nor first grade, but there was a significant relationship in second grade. Further analyses related word associations to the various components of reading.
Conclusions: These findings suggest complex relationships between reading development, vocabulary development, and comprehension.
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Elizabeth Crowe (); Connor, Carol McDonald; Petscher, Yaacov - An Examination of Above Average Readers and the Multidimensionality of Language and Literacy Achievement
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate the constellation of language and literacy skills that comprise proficient reading comprehension (+1SD) among fifth graders. Research on above average students has predominately focused on the affective domain, whereas the nature of achievement among these students is vague and in need of clarification.
Method
989 fifth graders (NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development) comprise this academically, economically and culturally diverse sample. Picture vocabulary, letter/word identification, and passage comprehension (Woodcock Johnson) were assessed at the end of fifth grade. Latent class analysis (Mplus) was used to model class membership for all fifth graders in our sample, which was not limited to students who have already been classified as above average.
Results
Preliminary analyses of class memberships reveal that above average reading comprehension clusters differentially with letter/word identification and vocabulary. This suggests that differential skills are present in students who, overall, appear to be ahead in reading.
Implications
Differences in achievement among highly proficient readers may indicate areas of reading strengths and needs that are overlooked by broader assessments of ability or achievement and cut points that arbitrarily establish student classifications.
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Todd Cunningham (University of Toronto); Geva, Esther - The Effect Of Reading Remediation Software On The Language And Literacy Skill Development Of Ell Students
Purpose: The study investigated the affect of two Computer Aided Language Learning (CALL) programs in comparison to regular ELL instruction on language and literacy skill development.
Method: Seventy-seven ELL students from grades 4 to 6 participated in a pretest-intervention-posttest design and were randomize assigned to one of thee conditions: 1) CALL-A listens to students reading and gives feedback on misread words, 2) CALL-B displays text while it reads to students, and 3) regular ELL class instruction. Students were administered language and literacy measures.
Results: For all conditions, students made significant pretest to posttest gains across measures, with the exception of phonological awareness for which a trend was found. The interaction between stage of English language and literacy development and language and literacy skill gains was also examined. Regardless of treatment condition, early-ELLs made significantly greater gains in word level reading, and there was a trend towards intermediate-ELLs having greater gains in listening comprehension and reading comprehension.
Conclusions: Though ELL students using CALL received less teacher instruction, they made the same gains as regular ELL class instruction. When teachers do not have time for one-on-one work, ELL students can us CALL as a supportive role in language and literacy skill development.
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Laurie Cutting (Kennedy Krieger) ;April Materck
;Sarah Eason
;Hollis S. Scarborough
- Effects of Different Training Approaches on Word Learning: Neurobiological and Behavioral Findings
Neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms by which individuals learn the pronunciation and meaning of words is relevant to reading development. Twenty adult skilled readers learned the pronunciation and meaning to 40 pseudowords through two training methods: 20 words were learned via isolation training, while 20 were learned via context training. Faster RTs during the learning phases were observed for the isolation training condition; however, after fluency practice, both conditions produced similar RTs. Neurobiological findings revealed that trained words showed activation patterns similar to those seen for low frequency words; furthermore, context training resulted in greater consolidation in the left occipito-temporal region.
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Daniel Daigle (Universite de Montreal)Bastien, Michel; Berthiaume, Rachel - Syllabic Sensitivity in Deaf Readers of French: A Case of L2 Reading?
Deaf people’s reading deficit is generally explained by their nonefficient word recognition processes (Colin et al., 2007), and specifically by poor phonological processing (Musselman, 2000). Another frequent explanation for deaf readers’ reading deficit is linked to the fact that for those who primarily use a sign language to communicate, the majority language (French in our case) is considered a second language (Strong & Prinz, 2000). In order to test this last explanation, we studied phonological processing of written syllabic structures in deaf adults (n=35) matched on reading-level to adult Chinese learners of French as a L2 (n=21), and compared to expert readers of French (n=40). We used two computerized tasks of syllabic sensitivity: one epilinguistic task and one metalinguistic task (cf. Gombert, 1992). The results showed that all groups performed better on the epilinguistic task than on the metalinguistic task. Interestingly, on both tasks, deaf readers got lower scores than the Chinese and the control readers. The Chinese and the control readers did not significantly differ. These results are discussed in terms of language analysis and cognitive control (cf. Bialystok, 2001) involved in the tasks and in terms of the role of syllabic sensitivity in reading in deaf people.
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Marcia Davidson (University of Maine)Farrell, Linda; Allen, Debra - Examining the Unique Role of Accuracy in Oral Reading Fluency Curriculum-based Measures
Purpose: This pilot study examines whether accuracy, as a measure separate from correct-words-per-minute (WCPM), contributes uniquely to predicting students’ performance on high-stakes reading measures.
Method: This study included two cohorts of students in second through third grades (N = 112). Both cohorts were followed for two years. All students were administered DIBELS oral reading fluency (ORF) passages four times a year for each of the two years. Outcome measures were the Maryland State Assessment (MSA) administered at the end of third grade and two other norm-referenced measures.
Results: A high accuracy threshold was a stronger predictor of students in second and third grades scoring at-risk on the MSA than WCPM, and similar results occurred for the other two measures. We arbitrarily set accuracy thresholds at 90%, 95%, and 98%. A 98% accuracy cutoff identified all third graders who were to be identified as at-risk on the MSA at the end of 3rd grade, while using established DIBELS benchmarks of CWPM only identified 75% of the at-risk students.
Conclusions: It may be important to consider setting a high accuracy threshold when calculating cut-off scores on ORF measures in second and third grades when determining whether a student should be classified as at-risk.
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Claire Davis (Haskins Laboratories) ;Drouin, Michelle - Relations between specific and general word learning
Purpose
A one-year longitudinal study was performed to test Chliounaki and Bryant’s (2007) hypothesis that children’s word-specific learning is a causal determinate in their general word learning.
Method
62 Kindergarteners were asked to read and spell high frequency real words and matched pseudowords (e.g., with-bith) in October, January and April (Sessions 1, 2 and 3).
Results
Cross-lagged panel correlation analyses indicated that from the beginning to middle of kindergarten (from Session 1 to 2) children’s early scores for high frequency words predicted their later scores for matched pseudowords better than their early pseudoword scores predicted their later high frequency word scores. This was the case both for reading and spelling. Between the middle and end of kindergarten (from Sessions 2 to 3) the effect of early word specific knowledge on the later acquisition of word general knowledge was still significant for spelling but not for reading.
Conclusions
The findings support Chliounaki and Bryant’s hypothesis that children’s knowledge of specific words plays a causal role in the early development of code skills. Further, the findings extend their model to include simple grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules and an educational context where correspondence rules are explicitly taught.
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Bronwen Davis (University of Guelph);Evans, Mary Ann; Reynolds, Kailey - Parental Feedback During Shared Alphabet Book Reading: The Role of Child Miscues, Early Literacy Skills, and Alphabet Book Features
Purpose: We examined parent-child dyads reading an alphabet book together to identify the types of errors children make during alphabet book reading, the nature of parental feedback to these miscues, and whether miscues and feedback relate to literacy skills and to alphabet book features, such as the saliency of the featured object and familiarity of the object name. Shared storybook reading research indicates that children whose parents respond to errors with graphophonemic clues (e.g. pointing out letter sounds) demonstrate better subsequent word reading skills than children whose parents supply the miscued word. Alphabet books are absent in this research.
Method: Early literacy skills were assessed in 55 non-literate, senior kindergarten children. Sessions of parent-child dyads reading an alphabet book were audiotaped, and later transcribed and coded for child miscues and parental feedback. Each page of the alphabet book was also coded for several characteristics.
Results: Relations between child miscues and parental feedback will be examined, and related to current child literacy factors and specific alphabet book features.
Conclusions: Findings will contribute to the understanding of factors that influence parental feedback early in their child’s literacy development, and provide support for the development of empirically based criteria for alphabet book construction.
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Nicole Davis (Vanderbilt University);Compton, Donald - Latent Transition Modeling of Students with Early and Late-Emerging Reading Disability
Purpose: We examined (1) the stability of latent classes associated with reading disability (RD) and typical development (TD) across time and (2) early indicators of late-emerging RD.
Method: Analyses were based on a longitudinal sample of 177 students. At the end of 1st, 2nd, and 4th grades, students were assessed on word identification, sight word efficiency (SWE), and passage comprehension. Latent transition analysis models were developed to examine classification transitions from 1st to 4th grade and 2nd to 4th grade.
Results: Results suggested that a small group of children with late-emerging RD could be identified in the fourth grade. In addition, SWE measured in 2nd grade was found to reduce the number of false negatives for RD and therefore was important for the classification of RD. In regards to early predictors of late-emerging RD, participants’ performance on a listening comprehension task was a promising indicator. However, listening comprehension produced an unacceptably high rate of false positives.
Conclusions: Results from this study indicate that RD/TD classification is relatively stable, however a set of students were identified having late-emerging RD. Results highlight the need for a set of early indicators that can identify children who are at risk for developing late-emerging RD.
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Hélène Deacon (Dalhousie University); Kowalyk, Sarah; Sabourin, Chantal - Rooting out the root: Children's spelling of inflected and derived words.
Purpose: A key question in spelling development lies in the extent of children's sensitivity to the role that morphemes, or the smallest units of meaning in language, play in spelling. We examine here whether this appreciation is similar for derived and inflected words, given that the former typically involve changes in word class from the base form, while the latter do not.
Methods: To examine this question, we asked children in grades 2 to 4 to spell quadruplet sets of words that included the root, inflected and derived forms, as well as a control word (such as rock, rocked, rocker, and rocket).
Results: Preliminary analyses indicate that children were more likely to spell the initial letter-sound sequence correctly when this represented the root of the word than when it did not (e.g., rock in rocked and rocker than in rocket).
Most intriguingly, this effect was similar for inflected and derived words.
Further analyses will examine whether the same pattern of results emerges in coding of spelling consistency.
Conclusions: This study will inform us as to how much relatively young writers take advantage of the place that units of meaning play in spelling, permitting a refinement of our understanding of spelling development.
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Peter F. deJong (University of Amsterdam)de Jong, Peter; Bitter, Daniëlle; Marinus, Eva; van Setten, Margot; - Is there phonological recoding during silent reading?
According to Share’s self-teaching hypothesis, phonological recoding is the mechanism by which beginning readers acquire (word specific) orthographic knowledge without the help of a tutor. The hypothesis is supported by a large number of studies in which children demonstrated orthographic learning of the spellings of pseudowords after reading aloud texts that contained these pseudowords. More recently, orthographic learning after silent text reading has also been shown. However, it is yet unclear whether orthographic learning during silent reading is due to phonological recoding, because independent evidence of the use of phonological recoding during silent reading is hard to get. Two studies will be presented in which we hypothesized that 1) there is phonological recoding of pseudowords during silent reading and 2) orthographic learning during silent reading is due to phonological recoding.
In the first study second grade children read texts either silently or aloud. In the second study, a lexical decision task was administered to second grade children in two conditions. In the standard condition the task was done silently. In the second condition phonological recoding was suppressed. The results of both studies provide support for the first hypothesis but not for the second.
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Carolyn A. Denton (University of Texas Health Science Center - Houston);Barth, A. E.; Cirino, P. T.; Wexler, J.; Vaughn, S.; Romain, M.; & Fletcher, J. M. - The Relationship between Oral and Silent Reading Fluency and Comprehension in Middle School: How Fluent is Fluent Enough?
The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between both oral and silent reading fluency and reading comprehension of middle school students. Guiding questions were (a) What is the relationship between oral or silent reading fluency and reading comprehension. (b) What proportion of variance in reading comprehension is accounted for by oral and silent reading fluency? (c) Is there a fluency rate that is “fluent enough” for adequate comprehension? Study participants were 1763 students in grades 6-8. Assessments included Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement III Passage Comprehension, the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation, the Middle School Progress Monitoring System, AIMSWEB Maze Measure and the Test of Sentence Reading Efficiency. Results indicate that the correlation between fluency (oral and silent) and reading comprehension is .57. The proportion of variance in comprehension accounted for by reading fluency (oral or silent) is .35. Results also indicate that there is not a reading fluency rate that is “fluent enough” for adequate comprehension. That is, if a high comprehension criteria is chosen (50th %ile), then a dysfluent reader has a 95% probability of not meeting this criteria, however a fluent reader has a 67% chance of being below this criteria.
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Alain Desrochers (University of Ottawa) ;Glenn Thompson; Alain Marchand; Pierre Cormier - The Development of Alphabetic Knowledge among French-speaking Children
over the Primary Grades
The Development of Alphabetic Knowledge among French-speaking Children
over the Primary Grades
The Development of Alphabetic Knowledge among French-spe
The writing system of modern French is based on an alphabet of 26 letters and auxiliary marks, and a set of about 130 single-letter or multiple-letter graphemes. We investigated the development of these graphic units among French-speaking children from Kindergarten to Grade 6 in a cross-sectional study (N = 777). Younger children, up to Grade 2, were asked to name all 26 letters plus three letters that carry a diacritic mark (é, è, ê). All children were asked to sound out 58 graphemes, consisting of single-letter or multiple-letter vowels or consonants. Separate multi-level analyses were carried out on the letter-naming and grapheme-sounding data, with stimulus characteristics (e.g. print-to-sound consistency) as Level 1 and children’s characteristics (e.g. grade level) as Level 2. The results indicate that single-letter graphemes are named and sounded out more accurately when they are vowels rather than consonants, when they have an inconsistent print-to-sound correspondence, when they do not carry a diacritic mark, and when the letter name begins with the phoneme represented by the letter itself. Similar results are observed with multiple-letter graphemes except that consonants are sounded out more accurately than vowels. Performance is found to improve from Kindergarten to about Grade 2 and then to level off.
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Susan Ebbers () - Morphological Families of Words in Narrative and Informational Text: Vocabulary Acquisition and Assessment in Second Grade
With the goal of examining morphological relationships, the author compared the first 2000 words from both informational and narrative texts at the second-grade level. Content vocabulary words were grouped in morphological families and tagged according to linguistic form: inflection, compound, or derivation. Tokens per family were counted. Key vocabulary targeted for assessment in each text was compared against morphological relatedness and word repetition factors. Results revealed that morphological relatedness varied greatly across the two texts. Compared to the narrative, the informational text included twice as many average tokens per morphological family. In addition, greater text-assessment alignment was found in the informational text. These findings suggest that informational text might provide developing readers with greater opportunities to learn targeted vocabulary, and unique opportunities to develop automatic word recognition, fluency, and vocabulary. Informational texts may also better promote morphemic processing during reading. This may be especially helpful for English Language Learners.
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Kari-Ann Ediger (University of Minnesota)Wendy Johnson; Tom Buchard; Jay Samuels - Profile of adult reading comprehension: declining working memory capacity and increasing vocabulary ability.
Purpose: a) to investigate the role of working memory in comprehension outcomes after accounting vocabulary ability, b) to explore patterns of individual differences relative to vocabulary ability, working memory capacity, and reading comprehension among adults.
Methods: Two hundred thirty twins and family members from the Minnesota study of twins reared apart were asked to read three passages of text aloud. After reading each passage participants were asked to recall everything that could be remembered. Coding skills, vocabulary and working memory were also assessed.
Results: The regression analysis indicated that working memory explains a small but significant amount of variability in comprehension. Results from the Pattern and Level analysis indicated that individuals who have their highest predictor score on vocabulary and their lowest score on coding skills tend to score higher on comprehension. Level and Pattern effects significantly accounted for 41% of the variability in comprehension.
Conclusion: Adults monitor and adjust their intake of information via coding skills in order to accommodate their working memory. The profile suggests that individuals with higher relative vocabulary ability read slower and make more coding skill errors yet have higher comprehension scores. Substantiation for a verbal preservation theory is discussed relative to aging and comprehension processes.
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Linnea Ehri (City University of New York, Graduate Center); Eric Satlow; Irene Gaskins - Grapho-Phonemic enrichment strengthens keyword analogy instruction for struggling young readers
Grapho- Phonemic Enrichment Strengthens Keyword Analogy Instruction for Struggling Young
Readers
Grapho- Phonemic enrichment st
First, second, and third graders (N = 102) who had completed at least one year of literacy instruction in other schools and had experienced failure entered this private school for struggling readers and received instruction in either of two types of systematic phonics programs over a four-year period. One group received a keyword analogy method (KEY) which taught them to decode words by analogy to 120 keywords. The other group received KEY enriched by instruction in grapho-phonemic analysis (KEY-PLUS). Results showed that KEY-PLUS students read and spelled words significantly better during the first two years of instruction than KEY students. The same differences remained evident, although not significant, during Years 3 and 4. The programs did not differentially improve reading comprehension. Results are consistent with developmental theories indicating the foundational importance of grapho-phonemic analysis for retaining written words in memory to facilitate word reading and spelling. Some effects of IQ were found. During Year 1, KEY-PLUS instruction was especially beneficial in helping average IQ students learn to decode pseudowords. High IQ students showed superior reading comprehension at the end of Years 3 and 4. High IQ students remembered word spellings better over the summer months than average IQ students.
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Amy Elleman (Vanderbilt University);Don Compton; Doug Fuchs; Lynn Fuchs - Exploring Dynamic Assessment as a Means of Identifying Children At Risk of Developing Comprehension Difficulties
In this presentation we present initial results examining the potential of an experimental dynamic assessment to aid in the identification of children at high risk of developing reading comprehension problems. The dynamic assessment measures children’s ability to make causal inferences in text by making a series of increasingly difficult cause and effect judgments. Increasing scaffolding is provided to the children to aid them in making the judgments. The amount of scaffolding required will be correlated with various measures of reading skill (i.e., word reading, passage fluency, and reading comprehension) in a sample of 100 children assessed at the end of second grade.
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Dion Eric (Université du Québec à Montréal); Monique Brodeur; Catherine Gosselin; Marie-Ève Campeau; Douglas Fuchs - Reading Problems among Students of Low Socioeconomic Status: An Experimental Test of the Prevention Model
Formal reading instruction has traditionally begun in first-grade, but the prevalence of reading disabilities among low socioeconomic status students has created an incentive to start reading instruction earlier. A relatively large-scale randomized study was conducted to determine the added-value of kindergarten reading instruction when first-grade reading instruction was improved. The study was conducted in a high-poverty area (Montreal, Canada). Kindergarteners (N = 270) and teachers were assigned to one of two conditions: evidence-based reading instruction in both kindergarten and first-grade (combined condition) or evidence-based reading instruction in first-grade only (first-grade condition). The program used in kindergarten, La forêt de l’alphabet, is adapted from the Project Optimize (Simmons & Kame'enui, 2003), and is designed to support letter sounds learning. The program used in first-grade is Apprendre à la lire à deux, is adaptated from the First-Grade Reading PALS (Fuchs et al., 2001), and is designed to support word-recognition. The pre-test kindergarten rapid letter naming was used to identify high-risk students. Compared with their first-grade condition peers, combined condition high-risk students had superior (e.s. = .54) end of first-grade decoding skills. A similar difference was not observed for their classmates. Early reading instruction thus appear especially important for high-risk students.
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Mary Ann Evans (University of Guelph); Jean Saint-Aubin - Eye Movements of Senior Kindergarten Children Reading an Alphabet Book and Relationship to Their Letter Knowledge
Eye Movements of Kindergarten Children Reading an Alphabet Book and Relationship to Letter Knowledge
Previous research tracking children's eye movements has shown that children rarely look at print when read storybooks. Alphabet books are referred to as "print salient books" with the presumption that they elicit greater attention to print. The purpose of this study was to describe children's eye movements when reading an alphabet book on their own, and to examine the relationship to their alphabetic knowledge. Each page displayed a single letter, a clear accompanying single object and corresponding printed word, and a bear which reappeared throughout the book. Twenty children ages 59 to 71 months were asked to read the book while their eye movements were monitored, and were tested on their letter name knowledge and receptive vocabulary. Results revealed that children spent significantly more time on the illustrations than on the letter or the word, which did not differ from each other. After controlling for vocabulary knowledge, the number of letters known by a child accounted for a significant amount of variance in the latency before fixating the letter, and the time spent fixating the word. Thus in order for alphabet books to elicit their attention to print, children must have acquired a critical mass of letter knowledge.
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Fataneh Farnia (University of Toronto (OISE));Geva, Esther - A Longitudinal Examination