PHONICS

Abstract

Learning to read is one of the most important skills to acquire, and elementary schools all place a high value on learning to read. In Christian elementary schools, reading at a high level is very important because it not only sets up a child for success academically and in life, but it also teaches a child to read the Bible for themselves. Since reading is highly valued in Christian elementary schools, the best approach used in a curriculum ought to be chosen. There are primarily three different approaches used to instruct a child to read, namely, balanced literacy instruction, whole language, and systematic phonics. Each of these methods have varying levels of success in teaching a child to read. The purpose of the capstone project was to produce a relevant handbook where the current research of “reading science,” translated into practical terms, would be put into a form that Christian Elementary Administrators can use more directly. The handbook offered a briefing on reading science and sound research on selecting the most effective initial reading instruction curriculum so that children in a Christian elementary school could learn to read at a high level.

The present essay aims at investigating the relationship between dyslexia, phonologi-cal awareness, and the development of reading skills, both in a first language (L1) and in a foreign language (FL)-and especially in the English language. The first paragraph offers a theoretical overview of the notions of dyslexia and phonological awareness. The essay moves on to examine the relationship between early phonological awareness skills in preschool children and the later development of their literacy skills. The authors then describe an intervention program to foster phonological awareness skills in English-speaking preschoolers, and propose to employ this practice in an adapted manner-in Italian preschools. What follows is a focus on the role of phono-logical awareness in primary school children. After reviewing the main approaches in the field of language teaching methodology, and their degree of 'dyslexic-friendliness', the authors present a phonics teaching proposal to strengthen not only phonological awareness skills in primary school children, but also to approach children to literacy in the form of regular correspondences between sounds and letters in English, through the educational tool of storytelling.

" This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy-making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in-house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned external organisations with limited remits have been analysed, with emphasis on how the screening check findings have been used in DfE decision-making. My conclusion is that the department has overestimated both the validity and the reliability of the check: partly because important sources of measurement error have not been explored, and partly because the available evidence has not been analysed in sufficient depth — or perhaps simply been ignored by the department. The whole phonics screening check seems to be the product of policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy-making. This has, in my view, seriously undermined the value of the PSC as a screening instrument, and one must wonder whether it is 'fit for purpose'.

" This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check (PSC), with special focus on the relationship between the UK Department for Education's policy-making and the evidence considered in the process of developing and evaluating the PSC. The reports from the in-house Standards and Testing Agency and from commissioned external organisations with limited remits have been analysed, with emphasis on how the screening check findings have been used in DfE decision-making. My conclusion is that the department has overestimated both the validity and the reliability of the check: partly because important sources of measurement error have not been explored, and partly because the available evidence has not been analysed in sufficient depth — or perhaps simply been ignored by the department. The whole phonics screening check seems to be the product of policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy-making. This has, in my view, seriously undermined the value of the PSC as a screening instrument, and one must wonder whether it is 'fit for purpose'. "

This study investigated whether two groups of 6-year-old beginning readers taught to read by a phonics and by a “book experience” non-phonics approach would differ in reading
comprehension as well as the processes of word recognition. The two groups were matched for word recognition but despite this, the phonics taught children had higher reading comprehension.
Phonics taught children produced more contextually appropriate errors, and in both single word and text reading made more spoken attempts at reading unknown words. The non-phonics taught children had much faster reading reaction times to familiar words but they scored less in phoneme segmentation and nonword reading tasks. Compared with the nonphonics group, the phonics group spent more time in attempts at identifying unknown words
and this included using contextual information, which apparently resulted in more rehearsal of the meaning of the story text and hence better reading comprehension performance.

Review of The New-England Primer, 1991 reprint of the Boston 1777 edition. The New-England Primer was the most popular elementary reading textbook in America in the late 1600s and the 1700s. Reprints allow our generation of Americans to appreciate how it combined lessons in reading with moral and didactic content. It provides a snapshot of how reading was taught, and it opens a window on the religious world of colonial and early national America.

In modern societies, the role of reading is becoming increasingly crucial. Hence, any impairment to the reading ability can seriously limit a person's aspirations. The enormous importance of reading as an essential skill in modern life has encouraged many researchers to try and find more effective intervention approaches. Technology has been used extensively to assist and enhance literacy learning. This analytical review aims at presenting a comprehensive overview of the existing research on technology-based or technology-assisted reading interventions for elementary grades, between 2000 and 2017, along with analyzing various aspects of these studies. After extensive research, 42 articles have met the inclusion criteria, which have evaluated a total of 32 reading programs. The studies are classified into six categories of phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and multi-component. Each reading category begins with a brief introduction. Then, the content and instructional mechanisms of each program in the category is explained, alongside the outcome of its interventions. It is found that vocabulary interventions, as well as using mobile, tablet and other non-computer technologies are massively overlooked. Furthermore, a very limited number of programs focused on fluency, none of them addressed all its components. In addition, despite the required long-term practice for fostering fluency, the reviewed studies have an average intervention time shorter than other intervention categories. This paper provides researchers and solution developers with an extensive and informative review of the current state of the art in reading interventions. Additionally, it identifies the current knowledge gaps and defines future research directions to develop effective reading programs.

Phonics is used to develop one of three cueing systems the brain uses to create meaning with print (semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonological).  Too often struggling readers are force fed a diet of phonics while the other two cueing systems are left to atrophy.  This short article uses research to make a case for a balanced approach.

It is commonly assumed that children with dyslexia are slower at
handwriting than other children. However, evidence of slow handwriting in children with dyslexia is very mixed. Thirty-one children with dyslexia, aged 9 years, were compared to both age-matched children and younger spelling-ability matched children. Participants completed an alphabet-writing task and a composition task on the surface of a digital writing tablet. Children with dyslexia wrote the same amount of letters per minute in the alphabet task but wrote fewer words per minute when composing their texts than children of the same age. Crucially, no differences were found between children with dyslexia and their same age peers for speed of handwriting execution, measured by the tablet, when writing the alphabet or composing their texts. However, children with dyslexia were found to pause within their compositions as often as the spelling ability matched group. Thus handwriting execution is not impaired in children with dyslexia. The slow writing that is typical of children with dyslexia is due to pausing more often when composing and is related to spelling ability. This may reflect processing problems in response to high
cognitive load through having to contend with spelling and composing concurrently.

AWEJ Volume.5 Number.2, 2014   

                                                                                                                                                                        Pp.54-69



Investigating EFL Omani  Learners’ Ability to Produce English Phonics in taught words and in untaught words

Salma Al-Humaidi
Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

Jasim Al-Belushi
Ministry of Education, Oman

Abstract
The aim of this study is to Investigate EFL Omani Grade Two Learners’ Ability to produce the (43) sounds which are taught in grades one and two course books. It focuses on answering the following question:Are there any significant differences between grade two learners' ability to produce phonics in taught words and in untaught words? The study sample consisted of second grade learners in Al-Batinah North Governorate in the academic year 2010/2011. They were 100 learners.To answer the research questions, a reading test to measure learners' ability to produce phonics was used. The Major finding of the present study was:There is a significant difference between grade two learners' ability to produce phonics in taught words and phonics in untaught words in favor phonics in taught words.

Key words: Grapheme, Phoneme, Phonics, Sound clusters

A number of studies have shown, counter-intuitively, that skilled adult readers find it difficult to correctly relate phonemes to graphemes in written words. In most adults this is of little consequence. However, teachers are required to show children how to relate phonemes to graphemes when teaching reading. This study investigated whether a brief period of instruction would improve the ability of adults in this task. Results showed a general level of improvement relative to controls. Exposure alone to the task had no effect. Improvement for the instructed group was not very large and there was difficulty relating phonemes to graphemes which had more than one letter. It may be that trainee teachers need instruction to improve knowledge of grapheme phoneme correspondence so that they can pass such knowledge onto young readers.

The study investigated the effect of phonics strategy on Lower Basic 3 struggling readers' performance in reading comprehension in Education Zone B of Benue State, Nigeria. One research question and one hypothesis guided the study. The population was made up of 22,172 pupils in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State. The sample comprised 174 Lower Basic 3 struggling readers located in six intact classes in 6 public schools using multi-stage sampling technique. Reading Comprehension Performance Test (RCPT) with reliability coefficient of 0.88 was utilized for data collection. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research question. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 alpha level. Finding revealed that there was significant difference in the mean performance scores of pupils exposed to phonics strategy and those exposed to letter identification strategy in reading comprehension in favour of those exposed to phonics strategy. It was therefore, recommended that teachers of English Language be trained to use phonics strategy to teach reading comprehension in order to alleviate most reading problems in young children and prevent future problems in their educational pursuits.

When integrated within a holistic literacy program, phonics applications can be used in classrooms to facilitate students’ self-directed learning of letter-sound knowledge; but are they designed to allow for such a purpose? With most phonics software applications making heavy use of image cues, this project has more specifically investigated whether the design of the images used in such applications may impact on the effectiveness of their self-directed use in classrooms. Using a quasi-experimental study, we compared two types of pictorial mnemonics used in tablet applications, along with teacher-led activity in three first-year classrooms from the one school. The difference between teacher-led activity and integrated picture cues was significant, with teacher-led activity proving more effective. The difference between teacher-led activity and form-taking picture cues, however, was not statistically significant. Given that the outcomes of this small-scale study suggest that image de...

In this paper I argue that insufficient attention is paid to the explicit teaching of comprehension in South African literacy policies and practices. Like elsewhere, governments reinforce the existing curriculum gap by trying to solve the achievement gap in early literacy. I substantiate my claim through a critical analysis of a report commissioned by the South African government and written by the National Education and Evaluation Unit (NEEDU). At an analytical level there is a logical problem with NEEDU’s recommendations about early literacy – there is a mismatch between the solutions and the problems it tries to solve. Unlike government responses to South Africa’s very poor results in national and international literacy tests, I claim that the findings of these tests point to the urgent need to teach higher-order questioning skills to teachers explicitly from preschool onwards. By referencing national and international research evidence of an approach to teaching and learning called Philosophy with Children, I argue that the inclusion of philosophical thinking in early childhood literacy education could help teach the ‘full literacy’ as recommended by the NEEDU report.

Abstract This research examines phonics instruction on multi-touch display technology for collaborative learning. The paper provides a brief discussion of technology, collaborative learning and literacy instruction and then focuses on the design of a Phonics application using collaborative learning interactions. The paper discusses the methodology of a multi-phase evaluation of the usability and the instructional design of the application. A survey was used for the usability study and a focus group consisting of experts in the field of ...

Phonics skills are considered to be the predictors of
reading disability, which is off late viewed  as a language based
disorder. The aim of the present study is to compare the phonics 
skills of high and low academic achievers across Bengali and
English. A checklist consisting of three parameters was
developed in both the languages to assess phonics skills. A total
of 42 normally developing bilingual females who attended
standard three to standard five in the age range eight to eleven
years participated in the study. The participants were classified as
high and low academic achiever based upon school performance.
Significant  differences were found in all the phonics skills in
both the languages except vowel sound skill in Bengali and letter
name in English. It is concluded that phonics tasks should be
provided importance and during classroom curriculum as it
distinguishes between high academic achievers from the low
academic achievers.

Does the type of reading instruction experienced during the initial years at school have any continuing effect on the ways in which adults read words? The question has arisen in current discussions about computational models of mature word-reading processes. We tested predicted continuing effects by comparing matched samples of skilled adult readers of English who had received explicit phonics instruction in childhood and those who had not. In responding to nonwords that can receive alternative legitimate pronunciations, those adults having childhood phonics instruction used more regular grapheme-phoneme correspondences that were context free and used fewer vocabulary-based contextually dependent correspondences than did adults who had no phonics instruction. These differences in regularization of naming responses also extended to some low-frequency words. This apparent cognitive footprint of childhood phonics instruction is a phenomenon requiring consideration when researchers attempt to model adult word reading and when they select participants to test the models.

La “Scuola estiva internazionale in Toscana di Studi leopardiani, pascoliani e montaliani” (II edizione, 2016) è un’iniziativa accademica che vede coinvolto il settore contemporaneistico del “Dipartimento di Italianistica e Comparatistica” della Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione dell’Università Cattolica di Milano. È realizzata in collaborazione con il “Centro di Cultura dell’Università Cattolica” di Lucca (fondato nel 1975).

Ai propri iscritti, la “Scuola estiva internazionale in Toscana” propone una settimana residenziale – nel centro storico della suggestiva città di Lucca – dedicata a un ciclo intensivo di lezioni e di conferenze (inframmezzato da tour lucchesi e da gite culturali in Toscana) finalizzate ad approfondire la conoscenza del pensiero e dell’opera di tre dei più importanti poeti italiani dell’Ottocento e del Novecento – Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) ed Eugenio Montale (1896-1981; premio Nobel per la Letteratura nel 1975) –, autori tutti e tre variamente legati non solo alla Toscana, ma altresì a Lucca e alla Garfagnana.

Risaputi sono i legami di Pascoli con Lucca, in specie dal 1895, quando da Livorno si trasferì a Castelvecchio di Barga. Pressoché misconosciuta è invece rimasta la menzione di Lucca e di Barga fatta da Leopardi, che nello Zibaldone il 19 dicembre 1826 scrisse: «Pietro Angelio  o degli Angeli,  da Barga (Castello di Toscana 20 miglia lontano da Lucca), nato del 1517. e morto del 1596»). Poco noti sono rimasti anche i legami lucchesi di Montale: che aveva delle biscugine a Lucca e una zia a Pietrasanta (entrata con enigmatiche apparizioni in testi quali Una visitatrice, Realismo non magico e Racconto d’uno sconosciuto); che intitolò Bagni di Lucca un componimento delle Occasioni; che menzionò i «buccellati» – il tipico dolce lucchese – nel Sogno del prigioniero e in Una visita quelli «di Cerasomma» (frazione, questa, di Lucca, ove nell’estate del 1928 egli presenziò alla festa di matrimonio tra un suo cugino e una parente di Anna Degli Uberti); che recensì Il volto santo di Pea (per poi donarne una copia a una delle sue muse ispiratrici, Paola Nicoli, e consigliarne la lettura a un’altra, Bianca Messina); e che quando inquadrò poeticamente Anna Degli Uberti a Genova, lo fece nella valle del fiume Bisagno («la foce del Bisagno dove ti trasformasti in Dafne», Annetta), ove i mercanti lucchesi di seta, che vi si erano insediati nel XII secolo, costruirono le loro chiese, tra le quali quella intitolata alla lucchese Santa Zita (ma, da scaltrito enigmista qual era, Montale ha reso intricata la soluzione ermeneutica, giocando sull’ambiguità: un altro torrente denominato anch’esso “Bisagno” ha infatti la propria foce nel borgo di Moneglia, a una quindicina di chilometri da Monterosso al Mare e da “Villa Vecchiona”, che fu la dimora delle estati monterossine di Anna Degli Uberti a cavallo degli anni Venti).

La “Scuola estiva internazionale in Toscana di Studi leopardiani, pascoliani e montaliani” vuole configurarsi come occasione di incontro tra nuove generazioni di studiosi (o di aspiranti tali) e maestri accreditati (docenti universitari strutturati, sia italiani sia stranieri). Vuole altresì configurarsi come luogo propiziante un proficuo scambio intergenerazionale di un variegato ventaglio di saperi, metodi e competenze, con lo sguardo sempre inteso all’approfondimento e nel contempo all’apertura di nuove prospettive, in un clima di sereno confronto e di dialogo costruttivo, nel rispetto delle differenti posizioni e interpretazioni, da recepire – senza chiusure preconcette – come opportunità dalle quali poter sempre e comunque trarre spunti interessanti per ulteriori ricerche e personali rielaborazioni.

Basic reading skills need to be acquired early in a target language to allow students to make full use of the educational opportunities given to them in all their subjects. Children with low literacy skills entering the primary level at Grade 1 cannot assimilate as much knowledge at school as those who are already reading. Grade 1 to 3 is a critical time as those reading below the grade 4 level, internationally, are classified as non-readers, with Grade 1 being a crucial link. Phonetic skills are an important component of reading skills. This paper describes studies aimed at discovering how knowledgeable primary school students (Grades 1-3) were in their phonetic ability to 1) sound out the alphabet, 2) identify which letters were vowels, 3) sound the vowels correctly, and 4) spell simple three-letter words. Standardized (Mico Diagnostic Reading Test) and non-standardized (Alignment Test, Phonics Test) tests were used to determine the literacy and phonic levels of over 1,609 student...