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The inclusion of pseudowords within the year one phonics ‘Screening Check’ in English primary schools
Abstract
The paper highlights problems surrounding the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check that has accompanied the legislative framework for synthetic phonics in English primary schools. It investigates the inclusion of pseudowords and raises questions regarding their generation and categorization, the rationale for their inclusion and the assumption that the early ability to read pseudowords is associated with later success in reading. It draws upon evidence from comparative European orthographic studies employing pseudowords that have implications for the way English pupils learn to read.
... However, the introduction of the Phonics Screening Check in England has by no means been uncontroversial. A number of commentators have objected strenuously to the test, and in particular to its inclusion of nonwords such as tay and plock (e.g., Clark, 2016;Gibson & England, 2016). The concern has been that nonword reading tasks discriminate against good word readers and children who come to school already reading. ...
... Critics claim that such children will err by pronouncing the nonwords based on their strong word knowledge. For example, in a broad critique of the Check, Gibson and England (2016) review a teacher survey conducted by the U.K. Literacy Association (UKLA, 2012), summarising it as follows: ...
... First, we coded the lexicality of their responses: An error response that is a word (e.g., rint read as "rent") as opposed to another nonword (e.g rint read as "ront") would be considered evidence of the influence of lexical processes on nonword reading. If stronger word readers make a higher proportion of such responses than weaker word readers, this would provide some support for concerns raised by Gibson and England (2016) that good word readers are disadvantaged by their superior word-level knowledge when reading aloud nonwords. Secondly, we attempted to capture the degree of overall similarity of the responses to the target nonwords: High Similarity errors were those that differed by only one letter or phoneme from the target items while Low Similarity errors were those that differed by more than one letter or phoneme. ...
... However, the introduction of the Phonics Screening Check in England has by no means been uncontroversial. A number of commentators have objected strenuously to the test, and in particular to its inclusion of nonwords such as tay and plock (e.g., Clark, 2016;Gibson & England, 2016). The concern has been that nonword reading tasks discriminate against good word readers and children who come to school already reading. ...
... Critics claim that such children will err by pronouncing the nonwords based on their strong word knowledge. For example, in a broad critique of the Check, Gibson and England (2016) review a teacher survey conducted by the U.K. Literacy Association (UKLA, 2012), summarising it as follows: ...
... First, we coded the lexicality of their responses: An error response that is a word (e.g., rint read as "rent") as opposed to another nonword (e.g rint read as "ront") would be considered evidence of the influence of lexical processes on nonword reading. If stronger word readers make a higher proportion of such responses than weaker word readers, this would provide some support for concerns raised by Gibson and England (2016) that good word readers are disadvantaged by their superior word-level knowledge when reading aloud nonwords. Secondly, we attempted to capture the degree of overall similarity of the responses to the target nonwords: High Similarity errors were those that differed by only one letter or phoneme from the target items while Low Similarity errors were those that differed by more than one letter or phoneme. ...
Nonword reading measures are widely used to index children’s phonics knowledge, and are included in the Phonics Screening Check currently implemented in England and under consideration in Australia. However, critics have argued that the use of nonword measures disadvantages good readers, as they will be influenced by their strong lexical knowledge and err by making word errors (e.g. reading flarm as “farm”). We tested this claim by examining the errors made by a group of 64 Year 2 children when reading aloud a set of simple nonwords. We found that stronger word readers were less likely to make a word error response than weaker word readers, with their most prevalent type of error being another nonword that was highly similar to the target. We conclude that nonword reading measures are a valid index of phonics knowledge, and that these tests do not disadvantage children who are already reading words well.
... Research (Siegal, 2008;Gibson and England, 2016) indicates that word reading assessment using pseudo-words provides a reliable assessment of phonics skills and also is a secure predictor of later reading skills. However, Gibson and England (2016) go on to point out that using less familiar real words is a similar predictor and so the case for the use of pseudo-words is debatable. ...
... Research (Siegal, 2008;Gibson and England, 2016) indicates that word reading assessment using pseudo-words provides a reliable assessment of phonics skills and also is a secure predictor of later reading skills. However, Gibson and England (2016) go on to point out that using less familiar real words is a similar predictor and so the case for the use of pseudo-words is debatable. Teachers in the survey data, reported changes in practice to include the teaching of alien words (rather than their use as an assessment strategy) and this was probed more deeply in the teachers' focus group. ...
The Phonics Screening Check (PSC) was introduced in England in 2012 for Year 1 children (aged 5 and 6). There have been criticisms of the check in relation to its reliability and appropriateness as an assessment for early reading, although advocates of the check see it as a valuable tool in securing progress in early reading. This mixed methods study sought to evaluate the intended and possible unintended consequences of the PSC, foregrounding the voices of children and their teachers. This article reports on findings from the teachers’ data. The study focused initially on questionnaire data from 14 schools (59 teachers) selected for their diversity in relation to attainment data (PSC and reading) and socio‐economic status. Focus groups in seven of the schools (25 teachers) enabled a more in‐depth exploration of teachers’ views and practices in relation to the PSC. The study identified the ‘negative backwash’ of assessment. The PSC was seen as an end in itself, rather than a way of securing progress in one of the skills of reading. It found that, the assessment had become the curriculum, to the detriment of specific groups of learners (higher‐attaining readers and children with English as an Additional Language). Teachers were found to use the assessment processes of the PSC as objectives for teaching rather than using them as the tools of assessment.
... When presented with words for which they have no semantic association or sight word recognition, children are required to apply their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences to "decode" the word. The same methodology underpins the Phonics Screening Check, which has been used in England since 2012 (Gibson & England, 2016) and is now in use across South Australia (Government of South Australia Department for Education, 2019). Word-level reading tasks that include both real word and pseudoword components can enable teachers to more accurately identify specific difficulties and to select interventions capable of targeting specific areas of weakness (Castles, Polito, Pritchard, Anandakumar, & Coltheart, 2018). ...
In this longitudinal study, the word-level reading trajectories of 118 children were tracked alongside teachers’ reported concerns and types of support provided through Grades 1, 2 and 3. Results show a significant decline in composite scores relative to age norms over time, with children achieving significantly lower in phonemic decoding than word recognition at the subtest level. Five group trajectories were identified: children who achieved average or above average scores across all 3 years (n = 64), children who consistently bordered on average (n = 11), children who achieved below average in Grade 1 but who then achieved average or above in Grade 2 or Grade 3 (n = 7), children who achieved average or above in Grade 1 but then declined to below average in Grade 2 or Grade 3 (n = 10), and children who achieved below average across all 3 years (n = 26). Appropriately, teachers’ concerns were highest for students in the groups that improved, declined or remained persistently below average. However, analysis of the focus of teachers’ concerns and the supports they said were provided to the children in these three groups suggests that teachers are not always accurate in their interpretation of children’s presenting characteristics, resulting in the misalignment of support provision.
... The inclusion of pseudowords has also drawn criticism, as it has been argued that pseudowords are particularly challenging for students who are already capable of reading for meaning (Coldwell et al., 2011). Furthermore, critics argue that the marking guidance provided to teachers for pseudowords is both overly restrictive in terms of acceptable pronunciations, and ambiguous about the allowances to be made for different accents (Gibson & England, 2016). Gilchrist and Snowling (2018) also found that performance on the phonics check correlates more strongly with measures of 2 K. S. Double et al. pseudoword reading rather than other more general measures of phonemic awareness that correlate more strongly with later reading comprehension. ...
The role of phonics instruction in early reading development has been the subject of significant conjecture. Recently, England implemented a phonics screening check to assess the phonetic decoding of 6‐year‐old students, to ensure that all students master this foundational literacy skill and attain adequate phonemic awareness in the early years of primary schooling. Students who fail this check are obliged to retake the assessment the following year. In this article, we compare the performance of students who initially pass this check (pass) and students who fail the original assessment but pass the retaken assessment (fail–pass), with students who fail both the original and retaken assessments (fail–fail). Using data from the Key Stage 1 assessment of reading and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), we examined the reading comprehension performance of these students approximately 1 and 4 years after their first phonics screening. The results suggested that fail–pass students performed substantially better than fail–fail students, even after performance on the initial phonics check was controlled for. While fail–pass students do not appear to entirely catch up with pass students in reading comprehension, their relatively better performance underscores the importance of intervening for those students who are identified as having problems with phonetic decoding to increase their likelihood of success at reading comprehension in later schooling.
... Whilst this may be resisted, as it is stated that the purpose of the pseudo words is to ensure that no child can 'sight read' the words and so bypass the application of phonics skills, it is important for policymakers to balance the negative unintended outcomes of using pseudo words with any positive outcomes in relation to reading attainment (of which there is no current evidence). Gibson and England (2016) and later, the Darnell et al. (2017) research concluded that there was little or no difference between using real or non-words in phonics assessment and so the replacement of non-words with real words would not compromise the assessment of phonics skills and knowledge. Because of the high stakes nature of the PSC, pseudo words are being taught as the curriculum rather than being used as an assessment tool. ...
The phonics screening check (PSC) was introduced in England in 2012 for children in Year 1. There have been criticisms in relation to its reliability and appropriateness as an assessment tool for early reading although supporters of the PSC see it as a valuable tool in securing progress in reading. The DfE‐funded evaluation concluded, however, that it “did not find any evidence of improvements in pupils' literacy performance, or in progress, that could be clearly attributed to the introduction of the PSC”. This article reports some of the findings from a doctoral study that sought to illuminate the voices of those most affected by the PSC: children in Year 1 and their teachers. The study used an illuminative evaluation methodology (Kushner, 2017) and focused on a range of schools in a large city, selected for their diversity in relation to attainment data (PSC and reading) and socio‐economic status. The findings demonstrate the negative backwash from the assessment process which has influenced the way that phonics is taught and so raises some questions for teachers and policy‐makers about the approach to the teaching of early reading in the light of the PSC.
A growing body of literature recognises the complexity of English literacy. It is well established that Phonics plays a pivotal role in its instruction, despite some uncertainty with regards to the degree to which practitioners should resort exclusively to the synthetic Phonics methodology and materials. This paper seeks to explore the Spanish academics' contribution to the existing research. The hypothesis established theorises that research in Spain lags behind investigations worldwide, since these began earlier, so there is a tendency to adhere to that worldwide predisposition. Findings suggest that the scarce research conducted thus far in Spain positively contributes to our understanding of the most suitable pedagogy of English literacy in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) environments. Similarly, the results endorse the need to adapt Phonics to non-native speakers. As a conclusion, considerably more work is needed, as many aspects remain to be elucidated of the appropriateness of Phonics within the idiosyncrasy of the Spanish educational system.
Premised on the notion of young children as natural semioticians, this chapter explores a case study in which an early educator works with a group of two-and-a-half to three-year-old children as they navigate early literacy development. The approach used fuses Vygotskian thinking with pedagogic processes that have emerged from Reggio Emilia. The educator scaffolds children’s literacy development using story and symbolic representations of characters and objects in the story, before replacing them with alphabetic symbols. The case study challenges the dominant discourse that privileges synthetic phonics as the exclusive method of early reading, currently in vogue in several Anglophile countries. What emerges is a broad multileveled approach to literacy in which children demonstrate agency, engagement and creativity as they acquire letter-sound recognition alongside higher order levels of reading.
This article examines the impact of a statutory assessment in England, the Phonics Screening Check (PSC), on classroom practices of grouping children by ‘ability’. Bearing in mind the argument that assessment is the rudder that steers the otherwise slow‐moving battleship of educational practice, it is argued that the PSC has altered how teachers organise their classes and curriculum in both the affected year group (Year 1, children aged 5–6) and in earlier and later years. Using data from a nationwide survey of teachers (n = 1,373), focus groups and in‐depth interviews with teachers, the article examines how this relatively new phonics assessment forms part of a ‘policy storm’ of pressures relating to accountability, which encourage teachers to place children in groups on the basis of ability, even when they have doubts about this practice and there is little evidence to suggest grouping improves attainment. Practices include grouping children within classes, across year groups or even across several year groups, by phase of phonics learning, guided by advice from bought‐in private phonics schemes. There is also evidence of ‘educational triage’, where borderline children become the focus, and increased use of interventions which involve withdrawing children. Overall, the article uses the PSC to demonstrate how, in times of multiple policy pressures, assessment can rapidly alter practice, in this case making grouping a ‘necessary evil’, as one teacher respondent argued.
Background
Introduced in June 2012, the phonics screening check aims to assess whether 6-year-old children are meeting an appropriate standard in phonic decoding and to identify children struggling with phonic skills.AimsWe investigated whether the check is a valid measure of phonic skill and is sensitive in identifying children at risk of reading difficulties.SampleWe obtained teacher assessments of phonic skills for 292 six-year-old children and additional psychometric data for 160 of these children.Methods
Teacher assessment data were accessed from schools via the local authority; psychometric tests were administered by researchers shortly after the phonics screening check.ResultsThe check was strongly correlated with other literacy skills and was sensitive in identifying at-risk readers. So too were teacher judgements of phonics.Conclusions
Although the check fulfils its aims, we argue that resources might be better focused on training and supporting teachers in their ongoing monitoring of phonics.
In England, current government policy on children's reading is strongly prescriptive, insisting on the delivery of a pure and exclusive form of synthetic phonics, where letter sounds are learned and blended in order to ‘read’ text. A universally imposed phonics ‘check’ is taken by all five year olds and the results are widely reported.
These policies are underpinned by the claim that research has shown systematic synthetic phonics to be the most effective way of teaching children to read. Andrew Davis argues that there is a basic problem with this claim. Whatever it is that empirical researchers take themselves to be doing when they investigate synthetic phonics, they are not investigating a specifiable method of teaching reading. This is for two reasons. First, there are no such things as specifiable methods of teaching. Teaching is a vastly complex human activity involving contextual and reactive practical judgments that are responsive to the myriad contingencies of classroom life. The idea that teachers might proceed by way of prescribed methods rather than practical judgments is simply a fantasy.
Second, teaching children to correlate letter combinations with sounds, and to blend sounds into sequences, is not teaching them to read. Reading is a matter of grasping meaning conveyed by text. While sustained attention to letter-sound correspondences can be helpful to some novice readers, we should neither assume that it is helpful to all nor confuse mastery of such correspondences with the ability to read.
Davis's challenge to government policy on the teaching of reading, and to the empirical research that supposedly underpins it, is timely, radical and compelling. The zeal with which synthetic phonics is championed by its advocates has been remarkably effective in pushing it to the top of the educational agenda; but we should not mistake zeal for warrant.
A review of the teaching of early reading in England commissioned by the UK Government recommended that synthetic phonics should be the preferred approach for young English learners. In response, all English schools have been told to put in place a discrete synthetic phonics programme as the key means for teaching high‐quality phonic work. In this paper we analyse the evidence presented by the review to support the change to synthetic phonics. We show that the review provided no reliable empirical evidence that synthetic phonics offers the vast majority of beginners the best route to becoming skilled readers. We analyse the available empirical evidence in English, and show instead that the data support approaches based on systematic tuition in phonics. There is also evidence that contextualised systematic phonics instruction is effective. However, more research is needed, particularly with typically developing readers, in order to determine whether contextualised systematic phonics is more effective than discrete systematic phonics.
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This study investigated the accuracy of several early literacy measures that have been used in research and practice for first grade reading screening. A set of measures, Word Identification Fluency (WIF), Letter Naming Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation Fluency, and Nonsense Word Fluency, were administered as screening measures with 138 first grade students in the fall of the school year. Reading skills were assessed at the end of first grade using Oral Reading Fluency, the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (Sight Word Efficiency and Phonemic Decoding Efficiency), reading Maze, and a latent variable composite. Analyses compared the accuracy at which each screening measure, as well as combinations of screening measures, classified students according to successful or unsuccessful reading outcomes at the end of the year. Receiver operating characteristic curve analyses indicated that when compared with other single screening measures, WIF tended to demonstrate the strongest overall classification accuracy. With levels of sensitivity held constant at .90, combining screening measures with WIF using predicted probabilities from logistic regression analyses resulted in modest improvements in accuracy by reducing the number of false positives. More measures were not always better, however, as models of two or three measures were as accurate as models consisting of all measures. Overall results provided support for WIF as a starting point for first grade reading screening, whereby additional steps might be taken to reduce false positives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Response to intervention (RTI) models for identifying learning disabilities rely on the accurate identification of children who, without Tier 2 tutoring, would develop reading disability (RD). This study examined 2 questions concerning the use of 1st-grade data to predict future RD: (a) Does adding initial word identification fluency (WIF) and 5 weeks of WIF progress-monitoring data (WIF-Level and WIF-Slope) to a typical 1st-grade prediction battery improve RD prediction? and (b) Can classification tree analysis improve the prediction accuracy compared to logistic regression? Four classification models based on 206 1st-grade children followed through the end of 2nd grade were evaluated. A combination of initial WIF, WIF-Level, and WIF-Slope and classification tree analysis improved prediction sufficiently to recommend their use with RTI. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACTS
This study investigated the effects of orthographic depth on reading acquisition in alphabetic, syllabic, and logographic scripts. Children between 6 and 15 years old read aloud in transparent syllabic Japanese hiragana, alphabets of increasing orthographic depth (Albanian, Greek, English), and orthographically opaque Japanese kanji ideograms, with items being matched cross‐linguistically for word frequency. This study analyzed response accuracy, latency, and error types. Accuracy correlated with depth: Hiragana was read more accurately than, in turn, Albanian, Greek, English, and kanji. The deeper the orthography, the less latency was a function of word length, the greater the proportion of errors that were no‐responses, and the more the substantive errors tended to be whole‐word substitutions rather than nonword mispronunciations. Orthographic depth thus affected both rate and strategy of reading.
Este estudio investigó los efectos de la profundidad ortográfica en la adquisición de la lectura en sistemas de escritura alfabético, silábico y logográfico. Niños entre 6 y 15 años leyeron en voz alta en el sistema transparente silábico japonés hiragana, en sistemas alfabéticos de opacidad creciente (albanés, griego, inglés) y en el sistema ortográficamente opaco de los ideogramas japoneses kanji. Los ítem fueron apareados según la frecuencia de las palabras en las lenguas estudiadas. El estudio analizó precisión latencia y tipos de error de las respuestas. La precisión correlacionó con la profundidad ortográfica: el hiragana se leyó más correctamente que, en orden decreciente, el albanés, griego, inglés y kanji. A ortografía más profunda correspondieron menor efecto del largo de las palabras sobre la latencia de las respuestas y mayor la cantidad de errores tendientes a ser sustituciones de palabras completas, en lugar de no‐palabras. En síntesis, la profundidad ortográfica afectó tanto la velocidad como la estrategia de lectura.
Diese Studie untersuchte die Effekte der orthographischen Vertiefung beim Erlernen des Lesens innerhalb alphabetischer, syllabischer und logographischer Schriften. Kinder zwischen 6 und 15 Jahren lesen laut vor, im transparenten syllabischen japanischen Hiragana, in Alphabeten mit steigender orthographischer Tiefe (albanisch, griechisch, englisch) und orthographisch unscharfen japanischen Kanji‐Ideogrammen, mit Einzelheiten kreuzweiseliguistisch verglichen auf Worthäufigkeit. Diese Studie analysierte die Genauigkeit der Antwort, Latenz und der Fehlerarten. Genauigkeit verlief korrelativ mit der Vertiefung: Hiragana wurde sorgfältiger gelesen als, umgekehrt, albanisch, griechisch, englisch und Kanji. Je tiefer die Orthographie, je geringer war die Latenz als eine Funktion der Wortlänge, desto größer war das Verhältnis an Fehlern aufgrund von Nichtbeantwortungen, und um so mehr neigten die wesentlichen Fehler Ganzwortsubstitutionen zu sein, anstatt Nichtwort‐Falschaussprachen. Orthographische Vertiefung beeinflusste daher beides, Grad und Strategie des Lesens.
Cette étude s'est intéressée aux effets de la profondeur orthographique sur l'apprentissage de la lecture avec des écritures alphabétique, syllabique, et logographique. Des enfants de 6 à 15 ans ont lu à haute voix avec le syllabique japonais transparent qu'est l'hiragana, avec des alphabets de plus grande profondeur orthographique (albanais, grec, anglais), et avec les idéogrammes orthographiquement opaques que sont les kanji japonais, les items ayant été appariés d'une langue à l'autre quant à la fréquence des mots. L'exactitude des réponses, leur latence et les types d'erreurs ont été analysés. L'exactitude est corrélée à la profondeur: l'hiragana est lu avec moins d'erreurs que, dans l'ordre, l'albanais, le grec, l'anglais, et le kanji. Plus l'orthographe est profonde, moins la latence dépend de la longueur du mot, plus grande est la proportion d'erreurs qui sont des non‐réponses, et plus les erreurs substantielles tendent à être des substitutions de mots entiers plutôt que de mauvaises prononciations de non‐mots. La profondeur orthographique affecte donc aussi bien la vitesse que la façon de lire.
The Rose Report, commissioned by the Secretary of State for Education for England, recommended in March 2006 that early reading instruction must include synthetic phonics. This paper evaluates the extent to which research evidence supports this recommendation. In particular, a review of international research into the teaching of early reading shows that the Rose Report's main recommendation on synthetic phonics contradicts the powerful body of evidence accumulated over the last 30 years. In this paper it is argued that action already taken by the UK government to change the National Curriculum in line with the Rose Report's recommendations represents a change in pedagogy not justified by research.
Spencer and Hanley (2003) showed that Welsh-speaking children aged between 5 and 7 years who were learning to read Welsh (a transparent orthography) performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than did English-speaking children living in Wales who were learning to read English (a deep orthography). In this study, the reading skills of these children were reexamined three years later, during their sixth year of formal reading instruction. The children learning to read English continued to perform poorly at reading low- and medium-frequency irregular words but no differences were observed in reading regular words or nonwords. These findings emphasize how long it takes to acquire a large sight vocabulary in English, but indicated that the reading skills of the majority of the English-speaking children had caught up with those of their Welsh-speaking counterparts. However, the poorest 25% of the English readers continued to perform much worse than the lowest performing 25% of Welsh readers on both words and nonwords. An underachieving tail of this kind was not observed in the reading performance of the Welsh-speaking group. Overall, these findings suggest that in the long term the detrimental effects of an opaque orthography are most damaging to the poorest readers.
The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because pseudowords lack distinctive semantic meanings. Because semantics can differentiate orthographically similar words (e.g., horse vs. house), by lacking distinctive semantics, pseudowords have greater interitem similarity than words, and hence more familiarity, which gives rise to the pseudoword effect. Across two sets of simulations, we demonstrate that this account explains the pseudoword effect in addition to accounting for why the pseudoword effect is absent when irregular nonwords are compared with words. Furthermore, our modeling efforts suggest a novel experiment that leads us to the discovery of a new concordant effect. Namely, extremely high-frequency words behave like pseudowords (giving rise to more hits and false alarms than high-frequency words) and also have less distinctive semantics than high-frequency words. We conclude that our work provides strong evidence in favor of the familiarity-based accounts of the pseudoword effect. We discuss the implications of our research with regard to various issues surrounding the pseudoword effect and REM model.
Pseudowords play an important role in psycholinguistic experiments, either because they are required for performing tasks, such as lexical decision, or because they are the main focus of interest, such as in nonword-reading and nonce-inflection studies. We present a pseudoword generator that improves on current methods. It allows for the generation of written polysyllabic pseudowords that obey a given language's phonotactic constraints. Given a word or nonword template, the algorithm can quickly generate pseudowords that match the template in subsyllabic structure and transition frequencies without having to search through a list with all possible candidates. Currently, the program is available for Dutch, English, German, French, Spanish, Serbian, and Basque, and, with little effort, it can be expanded to other languages.
This study demonstrates that even when subjects are instructed to perform a nonlinguistic visual feature detection task, the mere presence of words or pseudowords in the visual field activates a widespread neuronal network that is congruent with classical language areas. The implication of this result is that subjects will process words beyond the functional demands of the task. Therefore, contrasting brain activity in a word task that explicitly requires a cognitive function with a word task in which the function is activated implicitly will not necessarily isolate the brain area of interest. Furthermore, in most brain regions, we found that pseudowords, which have unfamiliar phonological associations and no associated semantic association, produce greater activation than words. Greater brain activity associated with pseudowords illustrates that unfamiliar stimuli that are unable to access word associations may activate the neuronal network more strongly than familiar words for which access occurs with ease.
Several previous studies have suggested that basic decoding skills may develop less effectively in English than in some other European orthographies. The origins of this effect in the early (foundation) phase of reading acquisition are investigated through assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading, and simple nonword reading in English and 12 other orthographies. The results confirm that children from a majority of European countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year. There are some exceptions, notably in French, Portuguese, Danish, and, particularly, in English. The effects appear not to be attributable to differences in age of starting or letter knowledge. It is argued that fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible. Syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding, whereas orthographic depth affects both word reading and nonword reading. The rate of development in English is more than twice as slow as in the shallow orthographies. It is hypothesized that the deeper orthographies induce the implementation of a dual (logographic + alphabetic) foundation which takes more than twice as long to establish as the single foundation required for the learning of a shallow orthography.
This resource brings a balanced approach to phonics, helping teachers find the right practical solutions to suit the children in their classrooms.
This study contrasts the validity of 2 early reading curriculum-based measurement (CBM) measures: word identification fluency and nonsense word fluency. At-risk children (n = 151) were assessed (a) on criterion reading measures in the fall and spring of first grade and (b) on the 2 CBM measures each week for 7 weeks and twice weekly for an additional 13 weeks. Concurrent and predictive validity for CBM performance level and predictive validity for CBM slopes demonstrated the superiority of word identification fluency over nonsense word fluency. Findings are discussed in terms of the measures' utility for identifying children in need of intensive instruction and for monitoring children's progress through first grade.
Despite a vast amount of study, literacy is still a very confused topic, which requires the integration of findings from different areas. Reading and writing are psychological skills, but they are also linguistic skills (since people read and write meaningful language) and social skills (since written language serves particular functions in different societies). In this book Michael Stubbs provides a basis for a sociolinguistic theory of literacy. He believes that a systematic theory of literacy must be based on an understanding of a number of factors, such as the relationship between written and spoken language, including how English spelling works and how it is related to spoken English. Also of paramount importance are the social, educational and technological pressures on written language, which are particularly powerful in the case of an international language like English; the social and communicative functions which written language serves – largely administrative and intellectual functions; and the variability of spoken language and the relative uniformity of written language.
In England, Higher Education institutions, together with the schools whose staff they train, are being required to incorporate synthetic phonics as one of the key approaches to the teaching of reading. Yet even if synthetic phonics can be identified as one of the component ‘skills’ of reading, an assumption vigorously contested in this paper, it does not follow that it can or should be taught explicitly and independently of reading for meaning. Imposing such a ‘method’ is, at a deep level, incompatible with teachers acting as teachers and potentially constitutes a kind of abuse of early readers. Moreover, because of the conceptual difficulties confronting any attempt to specify synthetic phonics as an approach, there cannot exist, in principle, empirical research that actually supports its value. Current policy in England since the Rose Report, at least, assumes the opposite. All this cannot be dismissed as a little local difficulty for England concerning the teaching of reading English with all its spelling irregularities: there are broader implications for the relationship between research and teaching, together with continuing tendencies to impose ‘teacher proof’ approaches on schools and their staff in many countries.
This article revisits Brian Simon's 1981 judgement that for deep‐seated historical reasons English education lacks a coherent and principled pedagogy. Given that since 1997 the tide of educational centralisation has added teaching methods to those aspects of schooling which the UK government and/or its agencies seek to prescribe, it is appropriate to test the continuing validity of Simon's claim by reference to a major policy initiative in the pedagogical domain: the government's Primary Strategy, published in May 2003. This article defines pedagogy as both the act of teaching and its attendant discourse and postulates three domains of ideas, values and evidence by which both are necessarily framed. It then critically assesses the Primary Strategy's account of some of the components of pedagogy thus defined, notably learning, teaching, curriculum and culture, and the political assumptions which appear to have shaped them. On this basis, the Primary Strategy is found to be ambiguous and possibly dishonest, stylistically demeaning, conceptually weak, evidentially inadequate and culpably ignorant of recent educational history. The article is an extended version of the last in the 2002–2003 Research Lecture series at Cambridge University Faculty of Education, and preserves some of the style of its initial mode of presentation.
National governments in Britain have consistently promised that, while they would legislate for a curriculum, it would not tell teachers how to teach. Our article suggests, however, that this policy is compromised with the current programme to `remodel the workforce' and augment the role of the classroom or teaching assistant. It does this in three ways. First, it examines the likelihood that what a teacher is may subtly change and overlap with the TA's new role. Second, it argues that despite what the government says, TAs will have little professional authority to question centrally determined initiatives regarding methods and approaches to teaching. And third, it takes a detailed and critical look at recommendations for teaching and learning contained within the government's publication Additional Literacy Support . This national programme for seven-year-old pupils comes complete with `Example Scripts' that are said to model `a perfect lesson' for TAs to imitate. We reflect upon these scripted lessons in detail, suggest that their view of perfection is at best contentious and conclude with the possibility that TAs may increasingly come to serve as a conduit for a centrally contrived pedagogy.
The Rose Review, a so-called Independent Review of the Teaching of Early Reading, was published by the British Government's Department for Education and Skills in March 2006, as a result of criticism from Members of Parliament and others, and dissatisfaction with certain aspects of the National Literacy Strategy in England. For reasons that are unclear, the remedy that the Review proposed, now adopted by Government, was the wholesale imposition on teachers of a narrow and reductionist approach to reading called `synthetic phonics'. Knowing the controversial nature of this approach, which has very dubious research backing, and faced with almost universal opposition to it, the Review needed to argue its case very persuasively indeed. This it did by making considerable use of the readily available and politically-inspired techniques of spin doctoring. In this article I analyse the language of the Review in an endeavour to illustrate how this was done.
During the past 15 yrs, a consensus has gradually emerged in the scientific literature that the fundamental problem underlying dyslexia or reading disability is a phonological processing deficit. In this chapter, I review the evidence for this position from a variety of sources, including (a) a description of how a phonological deficit in dyslexia manifests itself in a variety of tasks; (b) evidence that the phonological deficit in dyslexia is universal and occurs in all languages, independent of their orthographic systems; (c) the modularity of phonological processing and its independence from general cognitive ability; and (d) the role of phonological processing in beginning reading, especially for children who have difficulty acquiring basic reading skills. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English, French, or Spanish. Nonsense words that shared both orthography and phonology at the level of the rhyme with real words (cake-dake, comic-bomic), phonology only (cake-daik, comic-bommick), or neither (faish, ricop) were created for each orthography. Experiment I compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme orthography with real words (dake) with those that did not (daik). Significant facilitation was found for shared rhymes in English, with reduced effects in French. Experiment 2 compared English and French children's reading of nonsense words that shared rhyme phonology with real words (daik) with those that did not (faish). Significant facilitation for shared rhyme phonology was found in both languages. Experiment 3 compared English, French, and Spanish children's reading of nonsense words (dake vs. faish) and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic and phonological familiarity for each language. The size of the familiarity effect, however, was much greater in the less transparent orthographies (English and French). These results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by children who are learning to read more and less transparent orthographies.
This study compared the rate of literacy acquisition in orthographically transparent Welsh and orthographically opaque English using reading tests that were equated for frequency of written exposure. Year 2 English-educated monolingual children were compared with Welsh-educated bilingual children, matched for reading instruction, background, locale, and math ability. Welsh children were able to read aloud accurately significantly more of their language (61% of tokens, 1821 types) than were English children (52% tokens, 716 types), allowing them to read aloud beyond their comprehension levels (168 vs. 116%, respectively). Various observations suggested that Welsh readers were more reliant on an alphabetic decoding strategy: word length determined 70% of reading latency in Welsh but only 22% in English, and Welsh reading errors tended to be nonword mispronunciations, whereas English children made more real word substitutions and null attempts. These findings demonstrate that the orthographic transparency of a language can have a profound effect on the rate of acquisition and style of reading adopted by its speakers.
This study examined the pseudoword reading strategies of dyslexic readers (i.e., children whose reading was significantly lower than predicted by their IQ score) and poor readers (i.e., children whose reading scores were consistent with their lower IQ scores). The disabled readers were grouped according to their reading grade level and were compared with reading level matched, normally achieving readers. The reading performance on a test of pseudoword reading (Woodcock Word Attack Subtest) for the three groups (dyslexic, poor, and normal readers) was analyzed according to the type of error committed. The performance of dyslexic and poor readers was virtually indistinguishable at both reading grade levels 2–3 and 4–5. There was very little difference among dyslexic, poor, and normally achieving readers in the types of errors made. Nearly 50010 of all the oral reading errors of all three groups were vowel substitutions, followed by consonant substitution and deletion and insertion errors. Sequential, reversal, and word substitution errors were committed infrequently for all three reader groups. The findings failed to support the existence of a critical phonological processing difference between IQ reading- discrepant and IQ reading-nondiscrepant disabled readers and suggest that disabled readers lag behind normally achieving readers in phonological decoding skills.
Reading and written spelling skills for words and non-words of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. The regularity and transparency of the mapping between letters and phonemes make Italian orthography an unlikely candidate for discrepancies between reading and spelling to emerge. This notwithstanding, the results showed that reading accuracy is significantly better than spelling. The difference is particularly striking in first graders, but it is still evident in 2nd graders, though most strongly on non-words. The data show that reading and written spelling are non parallel processes and that the developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems.
Wimmer and Goswami (1994) report that seven-, eight-, and nine-year old English children had considerably more difficulties with a nonword reading task than German children who acquire an orthography with highly consistent graphen e-phoneme correspondences. In Study 1, seven-, eight-, and nine year old English children receiving a phonics instruction were presented with the same task and compared with the children tested by Wimmer and Goswami. Study 2 is a replication with different samples of English children receiving the standard eclectic approach combining both whole-word and phonics strategies, English children receiving a phonics teaching approach and German children who are taught via phonics methods and acquire a consistent orthography. Children from Grades 1 to 4 were tested. In both studies, the English phonics children read the nonwords with almost the same accuracy and speed as the German children. In Study 1, the English phonics children performed clearly better on nonword reading than the English standard sample. In Study 2, this difference was also evident but less marked. In Grade 1 English phonics as well as English standard children had clearly more difficulties with phonological decoding than German children indicating a relevant influence of orthographic consistency.
Two experiments were conducted to compare the development of orthographic representations in children learning to read English and Greek. Nonsense words that either shared both orthography and phonology at the level of the rhyme with real words (comic-bomic), phonology only (comic-bommick), or neither (dilotaff) were created for each orthography. Experiment 1 compared children's reading of bisyllabic and trisyllabic nonsense words like bomic vs. bommick, taffodil vs. tafoddyl, and found a significant facilitatory effect of orthographic rhyme familiarity for English only. Experiment 2 compared children's reading of trisyllabic nonsense words that either shared rhyme phonology with real words (tafoddyl) or did not (dilotaff). Significant facilitation in reading accuracy was found for shared rhyme phonology in English, with a significant speed advantage in Greek. These results are interpreted in terms of the level of phonology that is represented in the orthographic recognition units being developed by children who are learning to read more and less transparent orthographies.
In his analysis of the pseudoword effect, [Greene, R.L. (2004). Recognition memory for pseudowords. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 259–267.] suggests nonwords can feel more familiar that words in a recognition context if the orthographic features of the nonword match well with the features of the items presented at study. One possible account he mentions relies on two assumptions: (1) that items are matched to study only on the basis of the features the item affords, and (2) that the tendency to say old to a test item is proportional to the extent of featural overlap with study items. We find strong support for these assumptions with respect to accounting for the pseudoword effect observed in false alarms. However, our findings also suggest that the pseudoword effect on hits, when observed, reflects a different set of underlying processes, that appear more in line with the discrepancy-attribution notions of [Whittlesea, W.A., & Williams, L.D. (1998). Why do strangers feel familiar, but friends do not? A discrepancy-attribution account of feelings of familiarity. Acta Psychologica, 98, 141–165; Whittlesea, W.A., & Williams, L.D. (2000). The source of feelings of familiarity: The discrepancy-attribution hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 547–565.].
Copyright: MIT Press http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/089892999563490 Silent reading and reading aloud of German words and pseudowords were used in a PET study using (15O) butanol to examine the neural correlates of reading and of the phonological conversion of legal letter strings, with or without meaning. The results of 11 healthy, right-handed volunteers in the age range of 25 to 30 years showed activation of the lingual gyri during silent reading in comparison with viewing a fixation cross. Comparisons between the reading of words and pseudo-words suggest the involvement of the middle temporal gyri in retrieving both the phonological and semantic code for words. The reading of pseudowords activates the left inferior frontal gyrus, including the ventral part of Broca's area, to a larger extent than the reading of words. This suggests that this area might be involved in the sublexical conversion of orthographic input strings into phonological output codes. (Pre)motor areas were found to be activated during both silent reading and reading aloud. On the basis of the obtained activation patterns, it is hypothesized that the articulation of high-frequency syllables requires the retrieval of their concomitant articulatory gestures from the SMA and that the articulation of low-frequency syllables recruits the left medial premotor cortex.
Groups of 7, 8, and 9-year-old children who were learning to read in English and German were given three different continuous reading tasks: a numeral reading task, a number word reading task, and a nonsense word reading task. The nonsense words could be read by analogy to the number words. Whereas reading time and error rates in numeral and number word reading were very similar across the two orthographies, the German children showed a big advantage in reading the nonsense words. This pattern of results is interpreted as evidence for the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition in the two orthographies. German children appear to rely on assembling pronunciations via grapheme-phoneme conversion, and English children appear to rely more on some kind of direct recognition strategy. A model of reading development that takes account of orthographic consistency is proposed.
Several functional neuroimaging studies have compared words and pseudowords to test different cognitive models of reading. There are difficulties with this approach, however, because cognitive models do not make clear-cut predictions at the neural level. Therefore, results can only be interpreted on the basis of prior knowledge of cognitive anatomy. Furthermore, studies comparing words and pseudowords have produced inconsistent results. The inconsistencies could reflect false-positive results due to the low statistical thresholds applied or confounds from nonlexical aspects of the stimuli. Alternatively, they may reflect true effects that are inconsistent across subjects; dependent on experimental parameters such as stimulus rate or duration; or not replicated across studies because of insufficient statistical power.
In this fMRI study, we investigate consistent and inconsistent differences between word and pseudoword reading in 20 subjects, and distinguish between effects associated with increases and decreases in activity relative to fixation. In addition, the interaction of word type with stimulus duration is explored. We find that words and pseudowords activate the same set of regions relative to fixation, and within this system, there is greater activation for pseudowords than words in the left frontal operculum, left posterior inferior temporal gyrus, and the right cerebellum. The only effects of words relative to pseudowords consistent over subjects are due to decreases in activity for pseudowords relative to fixation; and there are no significant interactions between word type and stimulus duration. Finally, we observe inconsistent but highly significant effects of word type at the individual subject level.
These results (i) illustrate that pseudowords place increased demands on areas that have previously been linked to lexical retrieval, and (ii) highlight the importance of including one or more baselines to qualify word type effects. Furthermore, (iii) they suggest that inconsistencies observed in the previous literature may result from effects arising from a small number of subjects only.
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