4. Reading Development Flashcards
(45 cards)
1
Q
Why is reading important?
A
- functional illiteracy can prevent people from acquiring basic knowledge
illiteracy increases the likelihood of…
- poor physical/mental health
- workplace accidents
- medication misuse
- participation in crime
2
Q
What is the goal of reading?
A
- understand/comprehend what has been read
3
Q
What is the old phonics approach to reading?
A
- sounds that letters make are explicitly taught
4
Q
What is the whole language approach to reading?
A
- emphasises child’s discovery of meaning through literacy rich experiences
- decoding letters doesn’t necessarily lead to word understanding
5
Q
What is the difference in acquisition of learning to produce/understand spoken language compared to reading?
A
producing/understanding spoken language:
- just need to be exposed to a rich spoken-language environment
reading:
- learned skill: requires years of instruction and practice
6
Q
What is the challenge with reading?
A
- learning how to associate arbitrary visual symbols with the meanings of words
7
Q
What are the major categories of writing systems?
A
- alphabetic: symbols represent individual sounds/phonemes (e.g english)
- syllabic: symbols represent whole syllables (e.g japanese)
- morphophonetic: symbols represent elements of both meaning and sound (e.g chinese)
8
Q
What are graphemes?
A
- written symbols that represent a phoneme
9
Q
What is orthographic depth?
A
- the transparency with which symbols (graphemes) represent sounds (phonemes)
10
Q
What are shallow orthographies?
A
- characterised by a consistent relationship between graphemes and phonemes
11
Q
What are deep orthographies?
A
- characterised by a substantial inconsistent relationship between graphemes and phonemes
12
Q
What procedure and results did Seymour, Aro and Erskine conduct into alphabetic systems?
A
- children from 13 orthographies completed assessments of letter knowledge, familiar word reading and simple non-word reading
- those from most european countries become accurate and fluent in foundation level reading before the end of the first school year
- exceptions were french, portuguese, danish and english
- shows effects don’t appear to be attributable to differences in age of starting/letter knowledge
13
Q
What did Seymour, Aro and Erskine show about alphabetic systems?
A
- fundamental linguistic differences in syllabic complexity and orthographic depth are responsible for reading level
- syllabic complexity selectively affects decoding: orthographic depth selectively affects word reading and nonword reading
14
Q
What research did Spencer & Hanley conduct into alphabetic systems?
A
natural experiment comparing two groups:
1. children attending welsh medium schools (shallow orthography)
2. children attending english medium schools (deep)
- across the schools children started at the same age, had the same reading instruction and roughly equivalent SES
- both groups made gains BUT welsh was significantly more
- transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward
15
Q
How is phoneme-grapheme mapping in english?
A
- different phonemes can map to the same grapheme
- e.g the ‘a’ in ‘hate’ and ‘hat’ have different phonemes but the same grapheme
- same phonemes can map to different graphemes
- e.g the first letters of ‘cat’ and ‘kite’ are the same phoneme
16
Q
What triggers the acquisition of the alphabetic principle?
A
- segment phonemes in spoken words and identify their initial phonemes
- recognise the graphic symbols that correspond to the key sounds in the transfer task
- once children gain alphabetic insight, they need to succeed in a transfer task, learning is relatively robust and generalised
17
Q
What are the 3 phases of alphabetic decoding development?
A
- initial
- before acquisition of the alphabetic principle
- children ‘read’ words by relying on visual cues, rote learning or guessing - partial alphabetic
- begin to use a rudimentary form of decoding
- beginning to use alphabetic knowledge to make links between spellings and sounds - full alphabetic
- more complete knowledge of grapheme-phoneme relations: can apply knowledge consistently
- may be able to draw on oral vocab to correct a partial decoding attempt
18
Q
What are the 2 key cognitive processes in word reading?
A
- translation of a words spelling into sounds and then into meaning
- gaining access to meaning directly from spelling, without the requirement to do so via phonology
19
Q
What is orthographic learning?
A
- the acquisition of the word-specific knowledge required to access a particular words meaning from print
- the accumulation of more general knowledge about orthographic regularities within the writing system
20
Q
What is the self-teaching hypothesis?
A
- theory about the transition to skilled word reading
- children are able to self-teach through the combination of alphabetic decoding and repeated exposure
21
Q
How did Share conduct research into the self-teaching hypothesis?
A
- 8 year olds read short stories aloud containing novel words: ‘yait’
- days later they corrected the correct spelling of ‘yait’ from alternatives
- named novel word faster than homophones: more likely to use word to which they had been exposed
- evidence for orthographic learning beyond alphabetic decoding
22
Q
What changes as a result of exposure to printed words?
A
- lexical quality: extent to which a stored mental representation of a word specifies its form and meaning in a way that is precise and flexible
precision: allows a child to distinguish a written word from similar looking words
flexibility: allows a child to adapt dynamically to different print-meaning combinations (e.g eating jam vs getting in a jam)
23
Q
Why is lexical quality important for the transition from novice to expert readers?
A
- as lexical quality builds, cognitive resources are freed up for comprehension
- understanding a text is a complex task, placing heavy demands on attention memory and high level language processes
24
Q
What is high lexical quality vs low lexical quality?
A
- high:
- individual words recognised rapidly, automatically and with minimal conscious effort
- cognitive resources can be directed towards comprehension - low:
- readers limited cognitive resources are directed to more basic task of word recognition
- comprehension is compromised
25
What promotes the emergence of automatic and efficient word-recognition processes?
- amount of exposure to a given word matters, but so do words neighbours
the discrimination challenge of reading:
- discriminating of a word from many other words that differ by one letter requires development of a very precise recognition mechanism that attends to all letters in a word and their order
- discrimination is more challenging for some words than other words
26
What evidence is there that a lexical tuning process across reading development?
- beginning readers with knowledge of relatively small number of words encode only approximate information about letter position
- successful identification of a word even though there may not be full overlap between their cognitive representation of the words orthography and the visual input
- with greater exposure and gain in reading skills, lexical identification system is more precisely tuned to distinguish orthographically similar words
27
What are morphemes?
- the minimum meaning-bearing units in english
28
What are stems in words?
- occur and reoccur in words with similar meaning
- e.g clean, unclean, cleaner etc
29
What are affixes in words?
- alter the meaning of stems in highly predictable ways
- e.g unhook, unlock, unscrew
30
What is morphological awareness?
- explicit knowledge of morphological relationships
31
How did Anderson, Wilson and Fielding assess the motivation for children to read?
- monitored the out-of-school reading habits for US grade 5 children
- based on the amount of time children reported reading per day, estimated number of words they would've been exposed to over a year
e.g 10th percentile of time spent reading: 60,000 words per year
vs
90th percentile of time spent reading: >4,000,000 words per year
32
What is the Matthew effect?
- differences in exposure have cumulative effects on reading ability over time
33
What impact can rewarding children for reading have on their motivation to read?
may have a negative effect
- long term impact: leads children to believe that the behaviour has no intrinsic value
34
How does the simple view of reading explain reading comprehension?
reading comprehension is the product of two sets of skills:
- decoding
- linguistic comprehension
35
What three constructs underpin reading comprehension?
- knowledge: orthographic, linguistic and general knowledge are key sources of knowledge to be acquired
- process involved in reading
- general cognitive resources
36
What is orthographic knowledge in terms of reading comprehension?
- reading comprehension cannot happen without adequate levels of word-reading skill
37
What is linguistic knowledge in terms of reading comprehension?
- vocab: understanding the majority of individual words within a text is a prerequisite to understanding that text
- knowledge of multiword utterances, idioms, grammar, syntax
- cohesive devices allow information/ideas to be integrated across phrases and sentances
38
What is general knowledge in terms of reading comprehension?
- good background (real world) knowledge
- allows relevant knowledge to be activated as the situation model builds during reading
- provided coherent representations of the text and is required for many types of inference
39
What is processing in the reading systems framework?
- several process are engaged as people read
- focus on meaning activation, inference generation and comprehension meaning
40
What is meaning activation in processing?
- word meanings need to be integrated into the text representation as reading unfolds
- information that is activated but not needed needs to be disregarded
41
What is inference generation in processing?
- poor comprehenders find it difficult to integrate ideas across a text and are less skilled at answering questions that require an inference to be made
42
What is comprehension monitoring in processing?
- the collection of strategies/skills used to evaluate ones own comprehension, to identify when comprehension has gone astray and where appropriate, to repair any misunderstanding
- taps into capacities needed to monitor, update, and integrate information as the situation model builds
43
What is standard of coherence?
- persons criteria for coherent understanding of a text and therefore the extent of their motivation to make sense of what they are reading
44
What is the general cognitive resource, working memory?
- assist with reactivating relevant information from the text or from background knowledge
- deactivate/supress irrelevant info, freeing resources for ongoing comprehension
- greater working memory = retain more info = more inferences generated
45
