Chinese EFL Teachers’ Perception and Practice of Phonics Instruction

Phonics was introduced to Chinese mainland two decades ago. To gain an empirical insight into teachers’ perception in teaching phonics to EFL students, this study draws upon data from a survey among 213 primary school EFL teachers in two Chinese provinces. The findings indicate that most teachers hold positive attitudes towards phonics, regarding it more as a word-attack skill. The improvement of teachers’ educational background predicts better phonics teaching effect, yet they need systematic phonics knowledge. Besides, teaching material and teaching strategies are greatly correlated with the teaching effect. It concludes that phonics should be integrated into regular textbooks and effective teacher training is significant for better improvement of phonics instruction.

ANALYZING PASSWORD DECRYPTION TECHNIQUES USING DICTIONARY ATTACK

To guard ourselves against a word attack or a breach, it is always important to have an awareness of the unremarkably used sorts of attacks. The most common type of attack is password guessing. Hackers can guess the passwords locally or remotely using either manually or through an automated approach. One such attack is Dictionary Attack. A dictionary attack tries to make an authentication mechanism fail by sequentially entering each word in a dictionary as a password or trying to find the decryption key of an encrypted message or document. In this paper, an empirical research on how dictionary attack works are performed. In addition to that, different techniques and approaches to the existing dictionary attacks are implemented to make the system more robust. Furthermore, a comparison of methods is performed to find which approach is better to protect the system.

HOW RELIGION MATTERS: ISLAMOPHOBIA, TERRORISM AND TWITTER

Twitter, as one of the most used social media tools, helps construction of virtual communities and provides members with opportunity to reflect opinions, thoughts, emotions etc. With respect to the said feature of it, an analysis of public reaction over Twitter was conducted regarding four terrorist attacks in Beirut, Paris of November 2015 and Babil, Brussels of March 2016. The analysis was based on public hashtags created with city name plus the word ‘attack(s)’ - #ParisAttacks, #BeirutAttacks, #BrusselsAttacks, and #BabilAttack; and 9998 tweets posted following four days from the day of the attack were examined. For the purpose of the set examination, qualitative content analysis method was used and posted tweets were categorized with respect to their general meanings. In order to back up this research, it is also essential to introduce the terms terrorism, perpetrator of the aforementioned attacks, the ISIS, and the concepts of worthy and unworthy victims.

Predictor Importance in Future and Concurrent Predictions of Oral Reading Fluency

Background: Reading fluency is an important aspect of reading, yet little is known about what contributes to individual differences in reading fluency. The present study employs the use of dominance analysis to examine predictor importance in the prediction of 1st and 3rd grade oral reading fluency (ORF) from 1st grade reading related measures.Methods: Data from 312 children were collected in 1st grade on Sight Word Efficiency (SWE), Phonemic Decoding Efficiency (PDE), word identification (WID), word attack (WA), elision, sound matching, rapid letter naming (RLN), listening comprehension (LC), oral vocabulary, Dynamic Assessment CVCE score, Dynamic Assessment CVC score and ORF as well as ORF in 3rd grade. The relative importance of these measures in the prediction of concurrent and future ORF was examined using dominance analysis.Results: Results revealed SWE to be the most important predictor in the prediction of 1st grade ORF, achieving complete dominance over all other variables examined here. However, in the prediction of 3rd grade ORF, WID was the most important predictor, achieving some type of dominance over all other variables including conditional dominance over SWE. Conclusion: Word reading provided the most to the prediction of ORF with timed favored in the 1st grade model and untimed favored in the 3rd grade model. Implications for screening are discussed.

Teaching Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences Using a Direct Mapping Approach for At-Risk Second Language Learners: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Reading interventions developed to teach grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs) were evaluated among L2 at-risk readers. In the direct mapping of grapheme (DMG) condition, children’s attention was explicitly drawn to the application of a graphemes taught on that day to shared reading of words in authentic text. In the control condition there was no such systematic daily linkage of the GPCs and texts. The two reading interventions were otherwise identical. Two hundred fifty-three Chinese Grade 1 and Grade 2 students were screened, and those who scored in the bottom 30% of an English word-reading test were identified as L2 at-risk readers. Seventy-one L2 at-risk readers were thus randomly assigned to two conditions, both of which were small-group reading interventions: (a) DMG or (b) taught control. We hypothesized a significant main effect of Intervention condition and significant interaction of Intervention by Phonological Awareness (PA) effects on word reading, word attack, spelling, and sentence comprehension favoring the DMG intervention. Results showed that predicted interaction effects were significant for word reading, spelling, and sentence comprehension. No other effects were significant. Results suggest that the daily Direct Mapping of taught GPCs to shared book reading promotes reading development in at-risk English L2 readers with stronger phonological skills.

Decoding: It's Not All About the Letters

Purpose Reading requires the ability to decode and comprehend. Impairments in working memory (WM) are often implicated in students who are poor decoders. It is unclear whether this is a domain-specific issue or a task-specific issue. Therefore, this study examined how auditory–verbal (AV) WM, visual–spatial (VS) WM, and cognitive load affected the decoding skills of students identified as poor readers. Method Twenty-five 2nd-grade and 23 fifth-grade students completed 3 different measures requiring various levels of cognitive demand for each domain of WM, and their decoding skills were assessed with word identification and word attack measures. Results AV WM measures with moderate and high cognitive demands were correlated with 2nd-grade students' abilities to decode words. AV WM measures also predicted their performance on decoding tasks. For 5th-grade students, the AV WM measure with simple cognitive load was correlated with ability to decode words. The VS WM measures were not correlated with word identification or word attack at either level. Conclusions This study has implications for training instruction in reading. Because the AV WM measures and not the VS WM measures predicted decoding performance in second graders, a greater emphasis on language-rich reading programs could be beneficial in scaffolding early academic achievement and reading performance.

Growth in Reading Comprehension and Verbal Ability From Grades 1 Through 9

We systematically assessed the relationships between growth of four components of verbal ability—Information, Similarities, Vocabulary, and Comprehension subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale–Revised—and longitudinal growth from Grades 1 to 9 of the Woodcock–Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery Passage Comprehension subtest while controlling for Word Identification and Word Attack, using multilevel growth models on a sample of 414 children. Growth was assessed over all grades (1-9), and separately for early grades (1-5) and later grades (5-9). Over all grades, growth in Word Identification had a substantial standardized loading to Passage Comprehension, and all four verbal abilities had smaller, but significant standardized loadings to Passage Comprehension ( p < .05), with Information and Vocabulary having slightly higher loadings than Similarities and Comprehension. For early grades, results were similar to the overall results, with the exception of Vocabulary, which had a nonsignificant loading to Passage Comprehension. For later grades, Word Identification again had the largest, but substantially smaller standardized loading on Passage Comprehension and standardized loadings of all four verbal abilities were statistically significant with Vocabulary and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children–Revised (WISC-R) Comprehension having appreciably higher loadings than in the previous analyses. Conversation- and interaction-based intervention and instruction in oral language in general, and vocabulary in particular throughout early childhood and continuing throughout the school years, combined with evidence-based instruction that systematically develops the skills of phonologic awareness, decoding, word reading, fluency, and comprehension in school, may provide a pathway to reducing the achievement gap in reading.

Literacy Learning Cohorts

Two professional development (PD) models for teachers were compared on teacher and student outcomes. Special education teachers participated in Literacy Learning Cohorts (LLC), a PD innovation designed to improve content and pedagogical knowledge for providing reading instruction to upper elementary students with learning disabilities. The LLC, based on Desimone’s (2009) framework, included 2 days of initial PD with follow-up meetings, coaching, and video self-analysis. A comparison group received only 2 days of PD. Results of independent t tests and analyses of covariance indicated that LLC teachers demonstrated significant change in instructional time allotted to, and quality of, word study and fluency instruction. LLC teachers also made significantly greater gains on the fluency knowledge measure as compared with the comparison group, but they did not differ in word study knowledge. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that students of LLC teachers made significantly greater gains on word attack skills and decoding efficiency than did students of teachers in the comparison group.

Reading skill and exposure to orthography influence speech production

ABSTRACTOrthographic experience during the acquisition of novel words may influence production processing in proficient readers. Previous work indicates interactivity among lexical, phonological, and articulatory processing; we hypothesized that experience with orthography can also influence phonological processing. Phonetic accuracy and articulatory stability were measured as adult, proficient readers repeated and read aloud nonwords, presented in auditory or written modalities and with variations in orthographic neighborhood density. Accuracy increased when participants had read the nonwords earlier in the session, but not when they had only heard them. Articulatory stability increased with practice, regardless of whether nonwords were read or heard. Word attack skills, but not reading comprehension, predicted articulatory stability. Findings indicate that kinematic and phonetic accuracy analyses provide insight into how orthography influences implicit language processing.