ABSTRACT
Iversen, Sandra and Tunmer, William E. (1993). Phonological processing skills and the Reading Recovery Program. Journal of Educational Psychology, 85, 112-126.
Introduction
The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of integrating systematic instruction in phonological recoding skills into the Reading Recovery Program of first grade students.
Population
The researchers studied three evenly matched groups of first grade students from Rhode Island. The students who had a mean age of 6 years, 2 months had all been classified as at-risk readers. They represented 30 schools and 13 school districts. Using data from either the Metropolitan Achievement Test or a district created battery of tests, the lowest readers at each school were determined. Using Clay's Diagnostic Survey and the Dolch Word Recognition Test, students were assigned to three evenly matched groups of 32 students each. There were two control groups. One group received standard Reading Recovery training and the other received standard intervention. The treatment group received modified Reading Recovery instruction that included training in phonological recoding. When it was deemed appropriated to release students from either Reading Recovery Program, due to increased reading competency, those students were posttested with The Diagnostic Survey, the Dolch Word Recognition Test, and various phonological measures. In addition to being matched academically, students in each of the groups were roughly matched according to geographical location, socioeconomic status and type of classroom reading program. Fifty-three percent (53%) of the students were enrolled in classrooms that followed a basal approach, thirty-four percent (34%) followed a mixed format and thirteen percent (13%) followed a whole language approach.
Methodology
At the beginning of the school year, two groups of teachers were trained in implementing the Reading Recovery Program. One group received the standard Reading Recovery training. The other group received the standard Reading Recovery training and additional training in phonological recoding.
Work with students began in October. Students met with teachers four times each week for 30 minute sessions. In the standard Reading Recovery Program a typical session included seven activities:
·
Rereading of two or more familiar books
·
Independent reading of the preceding lesson's new book while the
teacher takes a running record
·
Letter Identification with plastic letters
· Writing of a story that includes hearing sounds in unfamiliar printed words through sound boxes
·
Reassembly of a cut-up story
·
Reading of the new books
In the modified Reading Recovery Program explicit instruction in letter-phoneme patterns replaced the Letter Identification portion of the standard lesson, when the students were able to identify at least 35 alphabetic characters. During this portion of the lesson, children worked with magnetic letters to make, segment, and build new words. The purpose of this was to make students more aware of the fact that words with common sounds share common spelling patterns. Teachers initially modeled the activity, then gradually released responsibility to the students. At a later part in the lesson, students were required to repeat the same activities in writing. The aim of this was to help students develop metacognitive strategies for reading and spelling.
Children in both Reading Recovery Programs were posttested with Clay's Diagnostic Survey and the Dolch Word Recognition Test upon exiting the program and again at the conclusion of the school year.
Results
Examination of posttest scores at the discontinuation of the program revealed that both Reading Recovery groups significantly out-performed the control group, especially on tests of phonological awareness that measured both phoneme segmentation and phoneme deletion. It is important to note that students in both Reading Recovery Programs were instructed in a one-to-one situation as opposed to the control group students who received standard intervention in a small group setting. The individualized instruction may have played a role in facilitating students' progress in reading.
A most significant finding of this study was in the mean number of lessons students participated in prior to discontinuation between the two Reading Recovery groups. The mean number of lessons for the standard group was 57.31 and the mean number of lessons for the modified group was 41.75. This provides strong evidence that explicit systematic instruction in the interrelatedness of sounds and visual patterns of words boosts students' reading achievement.
The year end Dolch Word Recognition Test was used as the criterion variable. The predictor variables were the five measures taken at the point of program discontinuation. They included: Concepts about Print, Letter Identification, Writing Vocabulary and Dictation subtests of the Diagnostic Survey and pseudoword decoding. Of those five measures, only pseudoword decoding made an independent contribution to variability in the Dolch Word Recognition Test. The finding suggests that letter to phoneme knowledge plays an important role in the development of word recognition skills.
Discussion
The results of this study indicate that at-risk readers learn to read more quickly when given explicit systematic instruction in phonological recoding. The study also proved that the Reading Recovery Program, which involves one-to-one instruction is a highly effective intervention program that perhaps could be enhanced if phonological awareness training was introduced early in the program.