Learning to read as the formation of a dynamic system: evidence for dynamic stability in phonological recoding

Is Reading Instruction Evidence-Based? Analyzing Teaching Practices Using T-Patterns

The main goal of this study was to analyze whether primary teachers use evidence-based reading instruction for primary-grade readers. The study sample consisted of six teachers whose teaching was recorded. The observation instrument used was developed ad hoc for this study. The recording instrument used was Match Vision Studio. The data analysis was performed using SAS, GT version 2.0 E, and THEME. The results indicated that the teaching practices used most frequently and for the longest duration were: feedback (i.e., correcting the student when reading); fluency (i.e., individual and group reading, both out loud and silently, with and without intonation); literal or inference comprehension exercises (i.e., summarizing, asking questions); and use of educational resources (i.e., stories, songs, poems). Later, we conducted analyses of T-Patterns that showed the sequence of instruction in detail. We can conclude that <50% of the teaching practices used by the majority of teachers were based on the recommendations of the National Reading Panel (NRP). Only one teacher followed best practices. The same was the case for instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading, with the exception of teacher E., who dedicated 70.31% of class time implementing best practices. Teaching practices (i.e., learners' activities) designed and implemented to exercise and master alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness skills were used less frequently in the classroom.

Developmental Dysgraphia as a Reading System and Transfer Problem: A Case Study

This is a case study of an adolescent who had largely overcome his early difficulty in learning to read, but continued to have severe problems with spelling. He had no visual memory impairment, and his letter–sound knowledge and phonemic awareness were at adult levels. Testing revealed that his difficulties in both reading and spelling only manifested when processing unfamiliar words. He was slow and inaccurate when reading non-words, despite a sublexical system dominated by the use of grapheme–phoneme units. It is suggested that limitations in the processing of the reading system were responsible for the lack of an extensive set of induced position-sensitive sublexical representations (ISRs) that are contextually dependent. This would have serious consequences for transfer to spelling.

Learning with sublexical information from emerging reading vocabularies in exceptionally early and normal reading development

Predictions from theories of the processes of word reading acquisition have rarely been tested against evidence from exceptionally early readers. The theories of Ehri, Share, and Byrne, and an alternative, Knowledge Sources theory, were so tested. The former three theories postulate that full development of context-free letter sounds and awareness of phonemes are required for normal acquisition, while the claim of the alternative is that with or without such, children can use sublexical information from their emerging reading vocabularies to acquire word reading. Results from two independent samples of children aged 3-5, and 5 years, with mean word reading levels of 7 and 9 years respectively, showed underdevelopment of their context-free letter sounds and phoneme awareness, relative to their word reading levels and normal comparison samples. Despite such underdevelopment, these exceptional readers engaged in a form of phonological recoding that enabled pseudoword reading, at the level of older-age normal controls matched on word reading level. Moreover, in the 5-year-old sample further experiments showed that, relative to normal controls, they had a bias toward use of sublexical information from their reading vocabularies for phonological recoding of heterophonic pseudowords with irregular consistent spelling, and were superior in accessing word meanings independently of phonology, although only if the readers were without exposure to explicit phonics. The three theories were less satisfactory than the alternative theory in accounting for the learning of the exceptionally early readers.