Spelling and Meaning of Compounds in the Early School Years through Classroom Games: An Intervention Study.

Styliani N Tsesmeli

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02071

Abstract

The study aimed to evaluate the intervention effects on spelling and meaning of compounds by Greek students via group board games in classroom settings. The sample consisted of 60 pupils, who were attending the first and second grade of two primary schools in Greece. Each grade-class was divided into an intervention (N = 29 children) and a control group (N = 31 children). Before intervention, groups were evaluated by standardized tests of reading words/pseudowords, spelling words, and vocabulary. Students were also assessed on compound knowledge by a word analogy task, a meaning task and a spelling task. The experimental design of the intervention included a pre-test, a training program, and a post-test. The pre- and post-assessments consisted of the spelling and the meaning tasks entailing equally morphologically transparent and opaque compounds. The training program was based on word families (N = 10 word families, 56 trained items, 5 sessions) and aimed to offer instruction of morphological decomposition and meaning of words. The findings showed that training was effective in enhancing the spelling and most notably the meaning of compounds. A closer inspection of intervention data in terms of morphological transparency, revealed that training group of first graders improved significantly both on transparent and opaque compounds, while the degree of gains was larger on opaque items for the second graders. These findings are consistent with the experimental literature and particularly optimistic for the literacy enhancement of typically developing children in regular classrooms.

Highlights

Over the last decades, morphology has been receiving increasing attention among studies concerning children’s literacy acquisition (Carlisle, 2003; Nunes and Bryant, 2006; Sénéchal and Kearnan, 2007; Berninger et al, 2010; Bowers et al, 2010; Kirby et al, 2012; Nagy et al, 2014)
Findings of this study indicated that the morphological awareness intervention group increased its performance on standardized spelling, spelling of morphological patterns and a measure of reading comprehension, while there were no differences between the groups on spelling of orthographic patterns
The significance of the difference of the means among the groups on analogy, spelling, and meaning tasks was tested by a 2 × 2 × 3 analysis of variance in which Grade (G1 and G2) and Group (Experimental and Control) were between-participants factors and Task (Analogy, Spelling, and Meaning) was a within-participants factor

Summary

Introduction

Morphology has been receiving increasing attention among studies concerning children’s literacy acquisition (Carlisle, 2003; Nunes and Bryant, 2006; Sénéchal and Kearnan, 2007; Berninger et al, 2010; Bowers et al, 2010; Kirby et al, 2012; Nagy et al, 2014). Various aspects of morphological processing has started to be an important aspect of linguistic enquiry. Longitudinal studies have demonstrated that children with typical development acquire simple compounds very early and in a fairly consistent developmental sequence (Nicoladis, 2006). As soon as literacy is well established and children are progressing to later stages of development, they start out to enrich their language via the compounding process (Berman, 2009)

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