The ability of young learners to construct word meaning in context

This study examines young English readers’ ability to infer word meanings in context and to use metacognitive knowledge for constructing word meanings in relation to their reading performance. The participants were 61 fourth-grade students in the United States, comprising 24 monolingual English-speaking (ME) students and 37 English-as-a-second-language (L2) students; each group was also divided into strong and emergent readers in English. Participants were asked to read aloud paragraphs containing words unfamiliar to them in two different contextual conditions (i.e., explicit and implicit conditions), to guess the unfamiliar word meanings, and to tell a teacher how they arrived at the inferred meanings. Quantitative analyses found significant differences between strong and emergent readers in their oral fluency as well as in their ability to infer word meanings and articulate their use of metacognitive knowledge. Although significant differences were found in the ability to infer word meanings and the use of metacognitive reasoning between ME and L2 students, such differences disappeared after controlling for the size of students’ receptive vocabulary. Qualitative analyses also revealed differences in the kinds of knowledge and strategies that strong and emergent readers relied on when constructing the meaning of unknown words in both explicit and implicit contexts.

THE INFLUENCE OF PHONEMIC AWARENESS INSTRUCTION ON EFL EMERGENT READERS’ WORD RECOGNITION

Research has considered phonemic awareness skill as effective pillar in acquiring literacy skills. This skill has been identified as prerequisite for reading success However, little is known about the phonemic awarenessinstruction of Jordanian EFL emergent readers. This study therefore explored the impact of phonemic awareness instruction on word recognition among Jordanian EFL emergent readers.In this study, the research instrument was semi-structured interviews. Seven EFL students of emergent readers were interviewed. They were all first graders aged 7 years on average. Data were analyzed using content analysis. The findings indicated that there is a lack of knowledge or misunderstanding between the term of phonics and phonemic awareness as well. It has been also found that emergent readers’ views show positive support towards the use of phonemic awareness skill. At the end of the study, some pedagogical implications for curriculum designers as well as English teachers were provided accordingly.

Orthographic mapping instruction to facilitate reading and spelling in Brazilian emergent readers

ABSTRACTAn experiment and a follow-up study were conducted with Brazilian Portuguese-speaking kindergartners (N =90), mean age 53 months, to examine whether emergent readers benefit more from instruction in orthographic mapping (OM) of phonemes than OM of syllables at the outset of learning to read and write, and whether the addition of articulatory gestures in the OM training of phonemes enhances the benefit. In the experiment, children received instruction in small groups in one of four conditions: OM of phonemes with letters and articulation (OMP+A); OM of phonemes with letters but no articulation (OMP); OM of syllables and their spellings (OMS); and no OM control. Results showed that the OMP+A group outperformed the others in phonemic segmentation, reading, and spelling. On literacy assessments 1.5 years later, only the OMP+A group remembered how to segment words into phonemes. We conclude that despite the greater salience and accessibility of syllables than phonemes in spoken Portuguese, teaching phonemic OM better prepares emergent readers to move into reading and spelling than teaching syllabic OM. Moreover, instruction that includes articulation as well as letters to segment words is especially effective. Results support a graphophonemic connectionist theory of emergent reading and spelling.