EFFECTS OF AN ELECTRONIC GAME ON EARLY LITERACY SKILLS

ABSTRACT The attainment of the alphabetic principle is one of the earliest signs of successful literacy acquisition. Public school students from the Dominican Republic have low literacy skills, partly because of not being systematically exposed to the alphabetic principle while learning to read. This paper presents the results of an intervention to teach the alphabetic principle using a tablet-based game. Nineteen kindergarten students were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group during the last month of the 2017 school year. Students from the experimental group played with the game for ten sessions of 20 minutes each. Students from the experimental group outperformed the control group in syllable recognition after the intervention. The intervention did not influence other reading skills. Automatic syllable identification has been shown to boost early literacy acquisition, although it is not sufficient for students to become fluent readers.

Exploration des compétences initiales relatives au français de scolarisation chez des élèves hispanophones de 1re année scolarisés en Outaouais

This article explores the initial French language knowledge of 10 Spanish-speaking students in the Outaouais region in terms of the alphabetic principle (i.e., linearity, orientation, etc.) and the alphabetic code (e.g., knowledge of letters, syllables, and phonemes). To account for this, qualitative research has been conducted. Results of this study show that certain tendencies are observable, in particular, that first-grade Spanish-speaking students can recognize and identify letters of the alphabet. Identifying allographs has also proven to be an easy activity. Our results also invite us to describe the French schooling functions of the participants in our study, namely that the usefulness of reading-writing lies mainly in the activities they perform on a daily basis. With regard to the paratextual aspects and the various types of books, these seem completely unknown to the participants. It can be assumed that exposure to books at home is rather rare.

Reading Fluency in Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Readers

Prior to 2000, the role of fluency was poorly understood in deaf and hard-of-hearing learners beyond the examination of the use of repeated readings as an intervention technique. In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified factors critical to the development of literacy: phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary, reading comprehension, motivation, and fluency. Since that time, much has been written on all these topics, except motivation and fluency. This chapter examines the various points of view necessary to understand the complexities of fluency, including but not limited to speed of word reading, vocabulary, prosody, and supralexical unitization. Further, it examines how these components differ based on an individual child’s first language. A concluding section explores successful interventions and lays out a research agenda that will allow the field to move forward.

More than an alphabet

The Korean Hangul writing system conforms to the alphabetic principle to the extent that its graphs (i.e., its minimal orthographic components) represent phonemes, but it differs from the standard convention of alphabetic orthography by configuring its syllables as blocks. This paper describes the orthographic, phonological, and morphological characteristics of the Korean language and Hangul and reviews a selection of psycholinguistic studies that have investigated Hangul word recognition. In contrast to the results of studies employing Roman alphabetic orthographies, the reviewed evidence highlights at sublexical levels both the dominance of syllable-based processing and a propensity to process CVC syllables as body (CV) plus coda (C) units rather than as onset (C) plus rime (VC) units, which together indicate a script-specific decoding of Hangul words. Although the morphological characteristics of Korean have yet to be fully investigated, consistent with the fact that approximately 70 percent of the Korean lexicon consists of Sino-Korean vocabulary, studies have also observed morphological effects on Hangul word recognition. Based on the psycholinguistic evidence reviewed, this paper concludes by proposing to refer to Hangul as a morphosyllabic alphabet writing system, to the extent that the term appears to adequately capture the orthographic, phonological, and morphological characteristics of the script.

2. How to learn to read (or not)

‘How to learn to read (or not)’ looks at the stages through which a child must progress on the journey to literacy and the demands of learning to read. It argues that literacy builds on a foundation of spoken language and emphasizes the importance of the skills a child brings to reading. It also discusses the alphabetic principle, phoneme awareness, learning to spell, reading for meaning, and learning to read in different languages. In summary, a ‘triple foundation’ of symbol knowledge, phonological awareness, and rapid naming ability appears to underpin reading development universally. However, there are also additional predictors that are language-specific.

The substructure of phonics: The visual form of letters and their paradigmatic English pronunciation are systematically related

We demonstrate, for the first time, significant systematicity between the visual form of lettersof the Roman alphabet and their paradigmatic English pronunciation. We measure the visual distance between letters as Hausdorff distance and the phonological distance between their pronunciations as feature-edit distance. These two sets of distances are significantly positively correlated: letters that look the same tend to be pronounced the same. We discuss the implications for the teaching of the alphabetic principle in learning to read.

Progress in Reading Instruction Requires a Better Understanding of the English Spelling System

It is widely claimed that the English spelling system conforms to the alphabetic principle, according to which letters or letter combinations (graphemes) represent speech sounds (phonemes). But this is not accurate. English spellings have evolved to represent both phonemes and meaning (through morphology and etymology), and in direct contradiction to the alphabetic principle, spellings prioritize the consistent spelling of morphemes over the consistent spellings of phonemes. This is important because the alphabetic principle provides the main theoretical motivation for systematic phonics instruction that explicitly teaches children grapheme–phoneme correspondences in English without reference to morphology and etymology. Furthermore, this theoretical claim has biased the research literature, with many studies considering the efficacy of phonics but few studies assessing the relevance of morphology and etymology to reading instruction. We briefly describe the linguistic organization of the English spelling system and then outline pedagogical and empirical arguments in support of the hypothesis that reading instruction should be designed to teach children the logical and meaningful organization of English spellings.

Adults writing profile at the beginning of their reading and writing acquisition

ABSTRACT Purpose: to describe and analyze the writing profile of 12 adults in the literacy phase. Methods: 12 students of both genders enrolled in the Youth and Adult Education Program (EJA) of public school in a medium-sized city in the state of São Paulo. The study was divided into two stages: proposal presentation to participants and School Performance Test assessment to evaluate the writing phase and the type of error presented by each participant. Results: the majority of the results belonged to the alphabetical phase (criterion established by Ferreiro and Teberosky). The most frequent errors were grapheme omissions and oral support. Conclusion: results indicated the need to focus on the alphabetic principle acquisition, which allows the initial writing by the phonological route, and to work the differences between standard and colloquial language.