I thought it would help things out to create a new post for organizing the upcoming week's comments.
The week's topic is Orthography, and the readings are:
- Harn, B. A., Stoolmiller, M., & Chard, D. J. (2008). Measuring the dimensions of alphabetic principle on the reading development of first graders: The role of automaticity and unitization. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 41(2), 143-157. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=psyh&AN=2008-03121-005&site=ehost-live
- Rosenthal, J., & Ehri, L. C. (2008). The mnemonic value of orthography for vocabulary learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 100(1), 175-191.
- Wright, D., & Ehri, L. C. (2007). Beginners remember orthography when they learn to read words: The case of doubled letters. Applied Psycholinguistics, 28(1), 115-133.
- Choose a language other than English and describe its orthography. How would different orthographies possibly affect reading development?
In Maureen's email last week she said that on the revised schedule she had deleted all the assignments!
ReplyDeleteI thought so too but I'm not sure. The assignment question is still on the syllabus. So I might answer the question anyways. Hopefully that is okay...
ReplyDeleteThe orthography for the Spanish language is relatively shallow, as it is a very phonemic language. Most words have a one-to-one sound-symbol correspondence, and when they do not (as in the case of the silent "h" for example), there are consistent rules for dealing with this. Many words of Latin origin, that in English have double consonants, have only a single consonant in Spanish (eg. diferente). However, there are some double consonants and blends of course, and accents are used to expand the phonemic variation (source: www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j15/spanish.php).
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the articles this week it seems evident that dealing with this type of orthography would make reading development a lot easier than it is for those who must deal with more deep and complex orthographies such as English. The issue of when and how children learn the "legal and illegal position of doublets" as studied in the Wright and Ehri (2007) article would not be such a concern in the Spanish language, as there are far fewer instances of them. Teaching the spelling of words, in order to boost vocabulary acquisition, as they did in the Rosenthal and Ehri (2008) article would probably have resulted in more significant gains in pronunciation when dealing with the Spanish language, as the sound-symbol relationship is so strong.
Each orthography would present unique challenges for reading development and would require different teaching methods to ensure that the student is able to learn effectively. This also highlights how difficult it must be for second-language learners to learn a new language that may have a completely different orthography from the one that they are familiar with.
I found the Wright article quite interesting in learning that students do recognize the orthographic patterns of words from a very young age. When recalling learned words in the study, the students doubled the letters at the end even if the words had been taught with the initial letter doubled. The fact that they already are able to notice and rectify these illegal letter patterns even before they become full alphabetic phase readers is somewhat contrary to what I would have thought. I think that both articles emphasizing the importance of the orthography rather just the phonology will prove very important for instruction as it could ultimately change what teachers focus on from very young years. So much of the English language depends on letter combinations which together make up all the phonemic sounds to be fully competent for the English language. Emphasizing single letter/phonemic relationships does not promote students to become more comfortable and automatic with these patterns that can cause many readers difficulty throughout the early years. However, these basic letter/sound relationships are what are emphasized in school from a young age. It would seem that the sooner these multiple-letter sounds can be introduced, the better, and if children at such earlier stages do indeed recognize and draw attention to them why not introduce them as early as possible.
ReplyDeleteI also found the article by Rosenthal and Ehri (2008) arguing that spelling promotes proper pronunciation and meaning of words interesting. In many schools spelling is not emphasized to the same extent as it was in previous times, as there seems to be some belief that it is not always useful. However, this article seems to show some support for it to continue to have an important place in the language arts program. I do think that the way spelling is taught and used in school is important as just memorizing the spelling of words in isolation is not optimal. From the stand-point of learning styles it does make sense that using both visual (graphemic) and auditory (phonemic) teaching strategies would allow for better word comprehension and pronunciation and I really liked how they compared it to a mnemonic device.
Reading these articles made me think of Claudia’s comment in our last class regarding sight words. Within at least two of the articles sight words were mentioned several times. It was mentioned that rather than decoding, the words are recognized as a single unit so I wonder if we could re-visit this conversation as there seemed to be a debate regarding what role sight words have in reading development.
My above post is not regarding the previous assignment as I also beleived that the assignments were being removed and that we were just to post on something interesting/relevant topic.
ReplyDeleteLike Janet, I will be posting general comments on this week’s readings. I’m going to try and keep it short, as Maureen said a paragraph would be sufficient!
ReplyDeleteI found Harn, Stoolmiller and Chard’s article especially interesting because I have been administering DIBELS for three years. I have often wondered why “nonsense” words? I have questioned the fact that students who read each letter sound independently score the same as their peers who are able to read whole words as a unit. At my school, DIBELS have been used as a tool to screen which students are “at risk,” but I have often noticed that once students get to a certain level they maintain the same score. I was somewhat relieved to read in this article that there is an issue of a plateau or ceiling effect. So once students have phonological awareness of alphabetic principle they can’t be expected to get any better and their test scores reflect this!
I feel more aware of the importance of orthography in developing language skills. I agree that English is a complex language and confusing to children who learn “language rules” and then turn around and see exception after exception to these rules!
While reading the Rosenthal & Ehri (2008) article this week, I thought about the challenges of teaching vocabulary to children who speak English as a second language. According to Rosenthal & Ehri (2008), students who have more orthographic knowledge have an advantage in learning new words as vocabulary is best learned when the written form (e.g. spelling aids) is paired with the spoken word and it’s meaning. If this is the case, then children who lack orthographic knowledge of the alphabet system would have multiple barriers to learning vocabulary, including the need to relearn how words in English are put together and having to learn new conventions of print before benefiting from using written forms in vocabulary learning.
ReplyDeleteFor example, the Chinese orthography is based on a logographic writing system instead of an alphabetic system. Words in Chinese often consist of strokes and although the Chinese orthography has been simplified over the years, often the Chinese characters are more pictorial. It is not a system based on letter-sound relationships where you can use knowledge about the alphabet to sound out or decode words. My parents tell me that their reading instruction in Hong Kong was based solely on memorization of different characters and the more they were exposed to Chinese characters, the more they learned how to read. This makes me wonder about our discussion about sight words in our last class. In a writing system that has less emphasis on linking letters to sounds, then are words learned by visual memory? I think it would also be interesting to look at studies with children who are deaf and how they learn to read words using our alphabetic system with their impairments.
For Chinese readers, I believe that the skill set in reading emphasizes more visual coding and less on phonological decoding (sounding out), although reading comprehension of the Chinese written system still require similar skills, such as language comprehension (e.g. having vocabulary knowledge and a sense of syntax). As well, when Chinese students first learn to read English they would have to develop a new understanding of print, as writing in Chinese goes from top to bottom vertically, while the English writing system goes horizontally from left to right. For students who have less orthographic knowledge (e.g. E.S.L. students), what strategies can be implemented to help them develop orthographic knowledge?
Thus, I do think that the reading process is different across cultures with some similar reading skills and other skills being less emphasized. While reading the articles, I also wondered if one’s vocabulary has a reciprocal relationship with orthographic knowledge with the more words you know improving one’s understanding of the written system.
Sorry, I know my response was long this week.
ReplyDeleteDutch orthography is considered to be particularly logical and relatively shallow compared to other Western European Languages. It is considered closer than average to a phonetic spelling. Apparently, it is quite straightforward to figure out pronunciation by looking at a Dutch word; however, the reverse is said to be more difficult. Deducing spelling from pronunciation of a Dutch word has some complications. The /k/ sound can be spelled "c" or "k", "ou" and "au" have the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" have the same sound as well. The /s/ sound at the end of a word can be spelled "sch". Also, the Dutch language uses many more vowels than can be accounted for by the Latin alphabet. To account for these, single and double vowels or consonants are used (ex. "voorraaddoos" which means "supply box"). The members of each pair are pronounced in various ways: sharp/dull, clear/dim, free/checked, tense/lax, open/closed, and long/short. Since Dutch orthography is a shallower than English, it would most likely be easier to learn to read, write and speak Dutch. However, since Dutch has a large amount of double vowels and consonants, many rules would still need to be learned. Ehri's research on legal and illegal position of doublets in English would be interesting to conduct (with modifications) using the Dutch language. Perhaps Dutch children would have a more difficult time recognizing legal/illegal positioning of doublets before they are able to read due to the prevalence of these double letters in Dutch orthography.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_orthography
I was also going to comment on Dutch orthography, since it's a language I have some familiarity with and interest in, but I see Leanne has already reviewed its orthography, so I'll just comment briefly. As Leanne said, compared to English, deriving the Dutch pronunciation of words from their written forms is very straightforward due to its shallow orthography. Although letter doublets are common in Dutch (and Flemish and Afrikaans), vowel doublets (oo, ee, aa) bear a direct relationship to, and signal the long vs. short pronunciation of the vowel. This is less true in English (e.g. note the pronunciation of "took" versus "cool").
ReplyDeleteWith regard to illegal doublets, I'm interested in Leanne's hypothesis that Dutch kids would have a tougher time recognizing illegal doublets because I might have guessed the opposite due to the relative (compared to English) regularity of the rules governing Dutch orthography: although doublets are more common in Dutch, the orthographic consistency of their appearance and locations might make illegal doublets stand out more.
In terms of applying a mnemonic value of orthography in learning, I would hypothesize that the regularities in Dutch orthography would aid comprehension and learning of vocabulary. I was interested in Rosenthal and Ehri's acknowledgement that "many second-language learners report heavy reliance on orthography for building their vocabularies" (p. 189) and think that Leanne's "voorraaddoos" is a great example of that: in terms of orthography, on the face of it, this is actually a pretty unusual word because of the double-doublets ("oorr" and "aadd"). However, even beyond to the grapheme-phoneme clarification that spelling might provide, a learner's knowledge of Dutch spelling in this case could help to signal that this is a compound word that could be broken down into smaller words components that might be more easily comprehended and remembered when attention is drawn to the spelling (compound words are very common in Dutch).
I have to admit that I don't have much knowledge in this field so it has been really helpful to read from you guys.
ReplyDeleteLike Spanish, orthography in Indonesian is also shallow. Unlike in English, each letter in Indonesian is linked to only one sound, with some exception in which two letters were put side by side to produce a different sound (eq. ng, ua, etc). These combinations consistent across situations. Therefore, once a child knows how to read and write in Indonesian (usually by grade 1), he can spell practically all words in Indonesian (depending on the capacity of his short term memory to store the sound before it is converted into symbol (letters)).
The same principle applied to doublets in Indonesian. Since we practically read every letter that is written, doublets can be easily broken. For example: "kakekku" will be read as "ka - kek - ku".
Just like Matt, I am also interested in what Rosenthal and Ehri said about second-language learners. However, I am still unsure about whether or not it actually helps me learning a second language.
Smile,
Yuli