Orthographic learning during reading: examining the role of self-teaching☆
Section snippets
Design
The tasks administered to the participants were of two types: (1) connected text with post-test assessments of orthographic learning; and (2) measures designed to assess a variety of cognitive skills that have been linked with early reading acquisition.
Participants
Thirty-four children (18 boys and 16 girls) from three second grade classrooms in a predominantly upper-middle class elementary school served as participants. Testing took place at the end of the second grade school year, during the months of May
Orthographic learning
As indicated in Table 1, 74.7% of the choices made on the orthographic learning task were choices of the target pseudohomophone. Only 12.9% of the choices made were the homophonic alternative of the target pseudohomophone. The substitution and transposition alternatives were chosen only 6.5% and 5.9% of the time, respectively. That the target choice exceeded that of all of the alternatives by a factor of almost three to one indicates that orthographic learning on the task was evident. A
Discussion
In the present study, we found that second grade students demonstrated robust evidence of orthographic learning three days after they were exposed to novel English words in text, under conditions that simulated the self-teaching that is expected to occur in normal everyday reading contexts. Children were able to more quickly and accurately identify, name, and reproduce these homophones, thus replicating Share's (1999) study and extending his findings to a different and less transparent
References (36)
- et al.
Varieties of developmental reading disorder: genetic and environmental influences
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(1999) - et al.
Development of phonological and orthographic skill: a 2-year longitudinal study of dyslexic children
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(1993) Printed word learning in beginning readers
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(1983)Phonological recoding and self-teaching: sine qua non of reading acquisition
Cognition
(1995)Phonological recoding and orthographic learning: a direct test of the self-teaching hypothesis
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(1999)Individual differences among children in reading and spelling styles
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
(1984)- et al.
Comparing differences in accuracy across conditions or individuals: an argument for the use of log odds
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
(1998) - et al.
The role of orthographic processing skills on five different reading tasks
Reading Research Quarterly
(1992) - Berninger, V. (Ed.). (1994). Varieties of orthographic knowledge: Theoretical and developmental issues (Vol. 1)....
- et al.
Theoretical links among naming speed, precise timing mechanisms and orthographic skill in dyslexia
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
(1993)
Modeling the growth of decoding skills in first grade children
Scientific Studies of Reading
Converging evidence for the concept of orthographic processing
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Assessing print exposure and orthographic processing skill in children: a quick measure of reading experience
Journal of Educational Psychology
Children's literacy environments and early word recognition skills
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Peabody picture vocabulary test—revised
Reconceptualizing the development of sight word reading and its relationship to recoding
Beginning readers outperform older disabled readers in learning to read words by sight
Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Acquisition of literacy: a longitudinal study of children in first and second grade
Journal of Educational Psychology
Cited by (198)
Orthographic learning in adults through overt and covert reading
2023, Acta PsychologicaPredicting EFL vocabulary, reading, and spelling in English as a foreign language using paired-associate learning
2021, Learning and Individual DifferencesHow orthographic knowledge is related to efficient word reading? Testing competing hypotheses
2024, Reading and WritingWhen more is more: effect of context and stimulus set size on orthographic learning
2024, Journal of Cognitive Psychology
- ☆
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to Anne E. Cunningham and a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to Keith E. Stanovich.
Special thanks to Dr. Marcia Wilson and the teachers Nancy Palker, Leslie Mulligan, Pam Rafanneli and the children at Beach Elementary School in Piedmont, California. Also to Pamela Douglas and Jane Gould-Caufield for their assistance in data collection.