Letter Name Knowledge Research Articles

Do levels of pre-school alphabetic tuition affect the development of phonological awareness and early literacy?

It has been suggested that children need exposure to alphabetic tuition before they can develop phonological awareness, especially phonemic awareness. This paper re-examines an existing data set to see whether two groups of pre-school, pre-literate children who differ in their knowledge of letter names (used here as a measure of alphabetic tuition) will also differ in their levels of phonological awareness. Their later performance on measures of school age reading and spelling attainment is also compared. The results show that the two groups of children did not differ significantly in either their phonological awareness or their literacy attainment.

READING DIFFICULTIES, READING-RELATED SELF-PERCEPTIONS, AND STRATEGIES FOR OVERCOMING NEGATIVE SELF-BELIEFS

In this article, we review a number of studies on thedevelopmentofachievement-related self-system factors in relation to young children's reading acquisition. Reading self-concept, academic self-concept, and reading self-efficacy appear to develop in response to initial experiences in learning to read. For children who experience initial and ongoing success or difficulty in reading, development of relations between reading performance and self-system factors occurs within the first year of schooling. Our studies also show that phonological processing ability and letter-name knowledge at the outset of schooling not only predict subsequent reading performance but also academic self-concept and reading self-efficacy. Children who are deficient in phonological processing or state a preference for using text-level cues for identifying unfamiliar words in text rather than word-level information tend to develop difficulties in reading as well as negative reading-related self-perceptions. To overcome both skill deficiencies in reading and the negative reading- and achievement-related self-beliefsthat develop in response to reading difficulties, we maintain that attention to the development of word-level skills and strategies is essential. Inaddition, we advocate the use of attribution retraining methods, combined with appropriate skills training, for overcoming children's negative self-beliefs.

Can't Jane read or won't Jane read? An analysis of pre-reading skills designed to differentiate skill deficits from performance deficits.

This single-student experiment demonstrated a method for assessing a student's poor performance on pre-reading measures that tested skill deficit and performance deficit hypotheses. This assessment was conducted for a student whose parents reported concerns regarding a variety of indicators of school functioning. During the summer prior to his entering first grade, his letter name knowledge, letter sound production, and Dolch word recognition were assessed. The assessment was conducted in a multiple baseline across the three reading tasks. Rewards and instruction were introduced sequentially across the three sets of reading materials. The results supported a combination reading skill and performance deficit hypothesis for the student. The assessment identified procedures that resulted in a substantial increase in reading fluency for these tasks. Procedures are adaptable to the needs of teachers, psychologists, and other education professionals who wish to determine whether reading problems result from poor skills or poor motivation. ********** Teachers, school psychologists, and other school practitioners are constantly faced with the learning problems of students who do not complete academic tasks or perform desired behaviors. These include a wide range of behaviors, from strict academic tasks such as division facts to school survival skills such as turning in assignments. Although it may be clear that the behaviors are not performed, it is often unclear whether the student does or does not know how to perform the skill. This study was conceived with the goal of designing a method for sorting these questions for students with academic problems. Skill deficits and performance deficits were originally proposed as classifications for social incompetence in children (Gresham, 1981). Within this system, a social behavior problem is classified as a skill deficit when the child does not have the skill required to perform a given social behavior. For example, Jack begins kindergarten in September. He is an only child who lives far from town and has not had the opportunity to play with other children. Jack's teacher notices that during recess, Jack does not play with the other children on the playground. When Jack's mother explains the situation to his teacher, his teacher suspects that Jack may not know how to ask the other students to join their game. She decides to show him how this is done and practice with him before going onto the playground the next day. On the other hand, a child who has been observed performing a particular social skill but does not do so under the conditions demanded by the situation is said to have a performance deficit. For example, after Jane's family has moved to a new school, her teacher reports to her parent that Jane does not play with the other children during recess. Jane's father replies to the teacher that Jane played well with other children in her last school. In this case, it is possible to determine that Jane has the requisite skills to play with others but has not used them in this new environment. Jane's teacher determines that the problem is a performance deficit and decides to ask other students to invite Jane to play during recess. Although these skill and performance deficit classifications were originally developed to describe problems in social competence in children, the concepts can be extended to describe problems in academic competence (Noell, Witt, Gilbertson, Ranier, & Freeland, 1997). An academic problem identified by a school practitioner would be described as a skill deficit when that skill had not been learned by the student in spite of instruction. The academic problem would be described as a performance deficit when, despite having observed the student perform that skill in another situation or at another time, the student does not perform the skill sufficiently to be considered competent according to the standards determined appropriate for that material. …

Letter name knowledge and the ability to learn to read by processing letter–phoneme relations in words: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese-speaking children

Previous studies [Scott & Ehri (1990) Journal of Reading Behavior22: 149–166; de Abreu & Cardoso-Martins (1998) Reading and Writing:An Interdisciplinary Journal 10: 85–104] have shown thatprereaders who know the names of the lettersuse a visual–phonological strategy to learn toread words in which the names of one or moreletters can be clearly detected in thepronunciation of the words. The present resultsextend these findings by showing that BrazilianPortuguese-speaking prereaders who know thenames of the letters can process letter–soundrelations to learn to read spellings in whichthe letters correspond to phonemes, not toletter names. Following Ehri & Wilce'sprocedure [(1985) Reading Research Quarterly 20:163–179], Brazilian preschool childrenlearned to read two types of simplifiedspellings: phonetic spellings, that is,spellings in which the letters corresponded tophonemes in the pronunciation of the words(e.g., SPT for sapato), and visualspellings, that is, spellings in which theletters did not correspond to sounds in thepronunciation of the words, but which werevisually more salient (e.g., VST for pijama). The children learned to read thephonetic spellings more easily than the visualspellings, suggesting that they recognized theletter–phoneme relations in learning to readthe phonetic spellings. This interpretation isbolstered by the results of correlationalanalyses between knowledge of letter sounds andperformance on the two word-learning tasks.While knowledge of letter–phonemecorrespondences did not correlate withperformance on the word-learning task with thevisual spellings, it correlated significantlyand positively with the children's ability tolearn to read the phonetic spellings.

Letter names, phonological awareness and the phonetization of writing

Following several studies on the relationship between phonological awareness, children’s knowledge of letter names and their understanding of the alphabetic code, we pose the hypothesis that children’s knowledge of letter names may contribute to their analysis of the oral segments of words, thereby enabling them to produce writing in which some of the sounds are represented by appropriate letters. The participants were 80-syllabic 5-year-old kindergarten children, who were assigned to 2 experimental and 2 control groups and submitted to phonological and letter knowledge tests. We asked the children in the experimental groups to write a set of words in which either the initial sound (Exp. G. 1) or the middle sound (Exp. G. 2) coincided with the name of a letter known by the child; the children in the control groups were asked to write a set of control words. The results show that the introduction of facilitating words prompts syllabic children to produce writing in which some of the sounds are represented by appropriate letters; Exp. G. 1 gave better results than Exp. G. 2. Finally, there is a positive relationship between the results achieved by children in phonological and letter name tests and the number of sounds they write phonetically.

The Foundations of Spelling Ability: Evidence from a 3-Year Longitudinal Study

The development of spelling skills was investigated at four points over the first 3 years of schooling in 153 British children. In order to uncover the developmental relationship between spelling and reading ability and to identify the component skills of spelling, children were assessed with a large battery of tests, including reading, phoneme awareness, letter-sound and letter-name knowledge, memory, and verbal and nonverbal IQ. Spelling productions were assessed both for phonological plausibility and for conventional accuracy. A path analysis revealed that phoneme segmentation and letter-sound knowledge were the precursor skills of early phonological spelling ability; in turn phonological spelling combined with reading to promote conventional spelling skill. Although initial phonological spelling ability predicted later reading, early reading ability did not influence later phonological spelling ability. These results indicate that skilled spelling requires a foundation in phonological transcoding ability which in turn enables the formation of orthographic representations. Our data also suggest that the increasingly complex and specific orthographic patterns demonstrated in children's spelling are learned through experience and instruction in both reading and spelling.

Early reading development in children at family risk for dyslexia.

In a 3-year longitudinal study, middle- to upper-middle-class preschool children at high family risk (HR group, N = 67) and low family risk (LR group, N = 57) for dyslexia (or reading disability, RD), were evaluated yearly from before kindergarten to the end of second grade. Both phonological processing and literacy skills were tested at each of four time points. Consistent with the well-known familiarity of RD, 34% of the HR group compared with 6% of the LR group became RD. Participants who became RD showed deficits in both implicit and explicit phonological processing skills at all four time points, clearly indicating a broader phonological deficit than is often found at older ages. The predictors of literacy skill did not vary by risk group. Both risk groups underwent a similar developmental shift from letter-name knowledge to phoneme awareness as the main predictor of later literacy skill. This shift, however, occurred 2 years later in the HR group. Familial risk was continuous rather than discrete because HR children who did not become RD performed worse than LR non-RD children on some phonological and literacy measures. Finally, later RD could be predicted with moderate accuracy at age 5 years, with the strongest predictor being letter-name knowledge.

The Foundations of Literacy

Learning to read and write in English requires children to master the alphabetic principle, the idea that the letters in printed words represent the sounds in spoken words in a more or less regular manner. Children need at least two skills in order to grasp the alphabetic principle. The first is phonological awareness, or a sensitivity to the sound structure of spoken words. The second is knowledge about letters, including knowledge of letter names and knowledge of letter sounds. Recent research sheds light on these foundational skills, documenting the linguistic factors that affect children's performance and how children put their phonological skills and knowledge of letters to use in learning to read and spell.

On the contribution of kindergarten writing to grade 1 literacy: A longitudinal study in Hebrew

This longitudinal study examined the relationship between kindergarten word writing and grade 1 literacy in a large sample of Israeli children. In kindergarten, a majority of children produced writing which displayed most of the graphospatial characteristics of conventional word writing, although only one-third of the children demonstrated a working knowledge of the alphabetic principle. Kindergarten writing significantly predicted variance in all three measures of grade 1 literacy (decoding, spelling, and reading comprehension), even after controlling for general intelligence. We also investigated the role of alphabetic skills and socioliteracy variables in accounting for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. Kindergarten alphabetic skills (phonemic awareness and knowledge of letter names), but not socioliteracy factors (parental print exposure, parents' reading to child, and Clay's Concepts about Print), explained all the variance contributed by kindergarten writing to grade 1 decoding and spelling. In the case of reading comprehension, both alphabetic and socioliteracy variables were able to account for the predictive power of kindergarten writing. As a precursor of reading comprehension, kindergarten writing appears to reflect both domain-specific alphabetic skills and broader socioliteracy factors underlying the higher order cognitive competencies essential for comprehending text.

America Reads in Head Start Classrooms: Partners in Literacy

In a partnership linking university faculty and students with Head Start programs, 50 student interns trained in early literacy development worked with over 500 children in 25 Head Start classrooms. Student interns spent 8-10 hours weekly planning and conducting literacy activities which emphasized written language forms, books and stories, and phonemic awareness. The results of the intervention for participating children were evaluated for knowledge of environmental print, letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and emergent writing at two points during the intervention (after 14 weeks and again after 26 weeks, on average). Children in the intervention classrooms demonstrated statistically significant differences on all measures when compared with a sample of Head Start children who did not have a student intern in the classroom and who were evaluated at 20 weeks. Teacher surveys rejected many beneficial effects in the classrooms, children, and teachers themselves. For Head Start programs, this intervention provides a positive model for enhancing children's literacy knowledge, as well as a blueprint for successful partnerships with university faculty and students.

A Comparison of Early Literacy Skills in Children With Specific Language Impairment and Their Typically Developing Peers

Although children with language impairments often experience difficulties learning to read and write, very little research has examined early developing skills in this population. In this project, preschool children with specific language impairment and peers matched for age, gender, and socioeconomic status were compared on measures of language, processing, and print-related skills. Results revealed that the children with language impairments performed more poorly than typical peers on tasks measuring knowledge of rhyme, letter names, and concepts related to print. Despite poorer performance of the group with SLI on narrative measures of linguistic structure, recall of information, and total events included, no significant differences were observed on inclusion of components identified as critical to overall plot line. Findings suggest that difficulties extend across early developing skills known to be important for both decoding and comprehension.

Invented Spelling in Kindergarten: The Relationship with Finger-Point Reading.

The relationship between ability to invent spellings and ability to finger-point read memorized text was examined in 109 kindergartners in whole-language classrooms. It was hypothesized that letter name knowledge and phonemic awareness would account for ability in finger-point reading, but that invented spelling, because it requires the left-to-right alphabetic principle as well, would account for additional variance, and this turned out to be the case. It was also hypothesized that although initial phoneme spellings would be easier than those in other positions, and would be a factor in the voice-print match in finger-point reading, final phonemes would also play a significant role. This turned out to be the case for children who were able to read only a word or two, as well as for more capable beginners. Results were consistent with Ehri's (1992) model of phonetic-cue sight reading in which letters are utilized from both initial and final positions.

America Reads in Head Start Classrooms: Partners in Literacy

In a partnership linking university faculty and students with Head Start programs, 50 student interns trained in early literacy development worked with over 500 children in 25 Head Start classrooms. Student interns spent 8-10 hours weekly planning and conducting literacy activities which emphasized written language forms, books and stories, and phonemic awareness. The results of the intervention for participating children were evaluated for knowledge of environmental print, letter names and letter sounds, phonological awareness, and emergent writing at two points during the intervention (after 14 weeks and again after 26 weeks, on average). Children in the intervention classrooms demonstrated statistically significant differences on all measures when compared with a sample of Head Start children who did not have a student intern in the classroom and who were evaluated at 20 weeks. Teacher surveys rejected many beneficial effects in the classrooms, children, and teachers themselves. For Head Start programs...

Consciência fonológica e habilidade de leitura na síndrome de down

O estudo investiga a relação entre a consciência fonológica e a habilidade de leitura na síndrome de Down (SD). Trinta e três indivíduos com SD participaram do estudo. Todos eles já haviam começado a ler e todos mostravam sinais claros de recodificação fonológica. Trinta e três crianças normais, emparelhadas aos indivíduos com SD em relação à habilidade de leitura, participaram como controles. Os resultados questionam a hipótese de Cossu, Rossini e Marshall (1993) de que a aquisição da leitura por indivíduos com SD não pressupõe a consciência fonológica. Embora os indivíduos com SD tenham mostrado um desempenho significativamente inferior ao das crianças normais nas tarefas de consciência fonológica, eles mostraram um bom desempenho em uma tarefa simples de detecção de fonema. De fato, análises dos escores individuais não revelaram uma diferença significativa entre os dois grupos naquela tarefa. Além disso, análises de regressão múltipla revelaram os mesmos resultados para os dois grupos de sujeitos. Em ambos os grupos, o desempenho em uma tarefa que pressupõe a habilidade de manipular explicitamente os constituintes fonêmicos da fala correlacionou-se significativamente com a habilidade de leitura, mesmo após havermos controlado o efeito de diferenças individuais no conhecimento das letras e na inteligência não verbal.

Segmentation, Not Rhyming, Predicts Early Progress in Learning to Read

We present a longitudinal study of children in the first 2 years of learning to read. A battery of tests of phonological skills administered when the children were prereaders identified two distinct and relatively independent factors, Rhyming (defined by measures of rhyme detection and rhyme production) and Segmentation (defined by measures of phoneme identification and phoneme deletion). Segmentation was strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at the end of the first year at school, while Rhyming was not. In addition, letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed an interactive effect with children's segmentation skills. By the end of the second year of school, however, rhyming had started to exert a predictive effect on spelling, but not on reading. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of the role of phonological skills in learning to read.

What's in a Name: Children's Knowledge about the Letters in Their Own Names

Two studies were performed to determine whether children's experiences with their own names boost their knowledge about the components of the name, the letters. The children in Study One showed a significant superiority for the initial letter of their own first name in tests of letter-name, but not letter-sound, knowledge. This pattern was found for Australian first graders (mean age 5 years, 5 months), U.S. kindergartners (mean age 5 years, 8 months), and U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 10 months). Study Two, with U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 11 months), again revealed an advantage for the initial letter of a child's first name in knowledge of letter names but not knowledge of letter sounds. Moreover, the children were better at printing the initial letter of their own first name than other letters. The results show that different factors are involved in the learning of letter names and letter sounds. They further suggest that children use letter-based strategies with their own names at a time when they are often considered to be “logographic” readers.

Alphabetic access route in beginning reading acquisition in Portuguese: The role of letter-name knowledge

The present study investigates Ehri's (Ehri & Wilce 1985; Scott & Ehri 1990) hypothesis that knowledge of the alphabet enables children to learn to read by processing and storing letter-sound relations in words. In particular, it examines whether letter-name knowledge facilitates the learning of spellings in which the names of one or more letters can be heard in the pronunciation of the words. Preschool children who could not read any word out of context were divided into two groups on the basis of their ability to name the letters of the alphabet: one group knew the names of the letters while the other did not. Both groups were taught to read two types of simplified spellings: visual spellings, that is, spellings whose letters did not correspond to sounds in the pronunciations of the words but which were visually more salient (e.g., XQKO for the word ‘cerveja’), and phonetic spellings, that is, spellings whose letters corresponded to sounds in the pronunciation of the words (e.g., CRVA for the word ‘cerveja’). In all phonetic spellings, the name of at least one letter could be clearly heard in the pronunciation of the words. Results corroborated Ehri's hypothesis. The children who did not know the names of the letters learned to read the visual spellings more easily than the phonetic ones. On the other hand, the children who knew the names of the letters showed the opposite pattern, that is, they learned the phonetic spellings more easily than the visual ones.

A Comparison of the Instructional Backgrounds and Cognitive Profiles of Poor, Average, and Good Readers Who Were Initially Identified as At Risk for Reading Failure

The kindergarten instructional programs of three groups of at-risk children were compared. Children in all groups were judged in kindergarten to be at risk for reading difficulties on the basis of their letter-name knowledge. The groups were partitioned on the basis of their first-grade reading performance (poor, average, and good readers). The results indicate that children in the most successfu1 reader group came from kindergarten classrooms in which more time was spent on phoneme awareness, spelling, and writing activities. The average and poor reader groups did not differ from one another on these characteristics. These latter groups did, however, differ on several measures of cognitive abilities that were administered in kindergarten, including measures of letter-name knowledge and verbal memory. The average reader group did not differ from the good reader group on any of the cognitive measures. The implications of these findings for classroom instruction are discussed.

Segmentation, Not Rhyming, Predicts Early Progress in Learning to Read

We present a longitudinal study of children in the first two years of learning to read. A battery of tests of phonological skills administered when the children were prereaders identified two distinct and relatively independent factors, Rhyming (defined by measures of rhyme detection and rhyme production) and Segmentation (defined by measures of phoneme identification and phoneme deletion). Segmentation was strongly correlated with attainment in reading and spelling at the end of the first year at school, though Rhyming was not. In addition, letter name knowledge predicted both reading and spelling skill and showed an interactive effect with children's segmentation skills. By the end of the second year of school, however, rhyming had started to exert a predictive effect on spelling, but not on reading. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of the role of phonological skills in learning to read.

The Fragility of the Alphabetic Principle: Children's Knowledge of Letter Names Can Cause Them to Spell Syllabically Rather Than Alphabetically

The present research was designed to investigate how children's early-acquired knowledge of letter names affects their spelling. Specifically, we asked whether kindergartners and first graders sometimes spell a sequence of phonemes such as /bi/ (the name of the letterb) or /zi/ (the name of the letterz) with the corresponding consonant letter rather than spelling the sequence alphabetically, with a consonant letter followed by a vowel letter. Children made a number of letter-name spelling errors, especially when the consonant and vowel formed a complete syllable. These results show that children's knowledge of letter names can cause them to deviate from the alphabetic principle—the principle that each phoneme should be represented with a single grapheme. The findings further suggest that syllables play a special role in early writing.