ABSTRACT
Ehri, L., & Wilce, L.
(1987b). Does learning to spell
help beginners learn to read words? Reading
Research Quarterly, 22, 48-65.
Introduction
The purpose of this study was to examine whether teaching beginning readers how to produce phonetic spelling would facilitate their ability to read words. The study involved two groups of kindergarten students. The experimental group was taught to spell while the control group practiced matching letters to isolated sounds.
Population
Twenty-four monolingual English-speaking students were chosen from a pool of sixty-three students. The thirteen boys and eleven girls represented two middle-class elementary schools. The subjects had a mean age of 5.7 years.
The subjects were chosen for this experiment, based on a pretest. These children were able to name at least nine (9) or ten (10) target letters, yet were unable to spell correctly more than two (2) of six (6) nonsense words that contained consonant clusters. Additionally, each subject was unable to read any of the words that would be taught in the word learning posttest.
The children were paired based on their pretest scores. If their scores were almost identical, they were randomly assigned, one to the control group and one to the experimental group. In the case that one student in the pair had higher pretest scores, that student was assigned to the control group. Of the twelve (12) pairs formed, nine (9) students in the control group had higher pretest scores on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and seven (7) students in that same group had higher nonword spelling scores.
Methodology
The participants in this study were instructed individually in seven (7) to eighteen (18) sessions. Each session lasted anywhere between fifteen (15) to forty (40) minutes. At the beginning of the experiment each student was pretested with five (5) separate measures. These tests included: a test of letter name and sound knowledge, a word reading test, The Slosson Oral Reading Test, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, and a nonsense word spelling test. Posttests were administered thirty-six (36) days later.
During the course of the study, the children in the experimental group were taught to spell sets of words that could be made from ten (10) letters (T, S, N, L, K, P, Ā, Ē, Ī, Ō). Most of the words that the children were taught to spell were nonsense words.
The trainers constructed seven (7) lists of words. CVs (24 words), CVCs (32 words), CCVs (12 words), CCVCs (24 words), VCCs (12 words) and CVCCs (19 words). As a part of this list, the children were taught the following consonant clusters, ST, SN, SL, NS, TS, and LS. The subjects were trained using letter tiles to spell the words. The students were taught that the vowels they were learning were long vowels that said their own name.
During the instructional session, the trainer pronounced the word. The subject repeated the word and then placed the letter tiles in an L-shaped frame, pronouncing the sound as the letter was placed. If a child made an error, the correct response was modeled and instruction on how to look for sounds in letter names and attention to articulatory movements was provided. Upon being able to spell and pronounce each word on the list correctly, the student was allowed to advance to the next list.
The students in the control group were taught how to match ten (10) letters to isolated sounds. The children were given two sets of letter tiles and were trained with the sounds in the same manner and with the same words with which the experimental group was trained. The focus of the control group was the individual sound in the words from the same seven word lists. The child was not permitted to move to the next list until all the sounds were mastered.
The posttest for both groups consisted of four tests, Printed Word Learning, Nonsense Word Spelling, Spelling Recognition Test, and Phonemic Segmentation.
On the Printed Word Learning test, students were taught to read simplified spellings of real words (i.e.: stōn, stō, ōn, tōn). After several trials, students were tested with the words. Each student had to read the list of words correctly twice and had a maximum of seven (7) trials to do so.
The Nonsense Word Test was the same test given during the pretest. On the Spelling Recognition Test, the students repeated a target word and chose the correct spelling from among four choices. Finally, on the Phoneme Segmentation test, the students were asked to pronounce a nonsense word and then while repeating the word they separated it into separate sounds while marking it with a blank token positioned in a frame.
Results
Results of the posttest indicated that two (2) students in the experimental group did not develop sufficient skill in spelling during the course of the study. Since those students were significantly lower than the others in the experimental group, they were dropped from the study. In the control group, two students who significantly out-performed their peers were also eliminated from the study.
The scores on the Printed Word Learning posttest were subjected to an ANOVA. An analysis of those results reveals that the students in the experimental group significantly out-performed the control group. This suggests that if beginning readers are trained in spelling, their reading achievement will be enhanced.
On the Nonsense Word Spelling test, the experimental group again proved to be superior to the control group. In particular, the experimental group made fewer errors in spelling nonsense words containing consonant clusters. Additionally, the control group made more errors by inserting letters that did not correspond to any of the sounds in the word. From this the researchers concluded that learning to spell involves knowing which letters to include as well as knowing which letters to exclude.
On the Spelling Recognition test the experimental group was more successful than the control group in matching the pronunciation to the correct spelling. This finding suggests that spelling training facilitates a student's ability to map relations between spellings and pronunciations. Finally, on the Phonemic Segmentation Test, the experimental group was able to segment more words correctly than the control group. According to the researchers, these results suggest that phonemic segmentation ability is enhanced when beginning readers are taught to spell.
Discussion
From the results on this study it can be concluded that training beginning readers in spelling helps to facilitate and enhance their early reading achievement. On each of the posttest measures the experimental group significantly out-performed their counterparts in the control group. The spelling training enabled members of the experimental group to become skilled in word reading by assisting them in storing words in their memory by using letter-sound associations. The instructional implications resulting from this study suggest that instructing beginning readers in spelling can indeed contribute to early reading success.
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