An investigation of the effects of phonics teaching on children's progress in reading and spelling

Learning strategies;

Watson, Joyce E.

University:University of St Andrews

Department:English (School of)

关键词: Learning strategies;   

Others  :  https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/2981/JoyceEWatsonPhDThesis.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

来源: DR-NTU

【 摘 要 】

Progressive child-centred education has led to the ascendancy of lookand say methods for children learning to read, perpetuating the use of a guessingstrategy and promoting a dependency culture. Explicit synthetic phonics withdirect teaching of the alphabetic principle has been replaced by gradual analyticphonics or no phonics, leaving children to discover spelling patterns forthemselves.This investigation was directed towards identifying the relationshipbetween different teaching methods and children's progress in word reading,spelling and reading comprehension. Initially, such progress was monitored from1993-1995 in 12 Primary classes. Analyses of the data collected indicated that(a) accelerated letter-sound knowledge and the ability to blend letter sounds hada significant effect on children's progress in reading, spelling and comprehensionand (b) the degree to which blending had been explicitly taught had a significantpositive effect on the proportion of spelling errors produced which encodeorthographic information.The effects of accelerating letter-sound knowledge and sounding andblending were then examined experimentally in Primary 1 children using twoexperimental groups and one control group. It was found that explicit syntheticphonics, which demonstrates how letters blend together to form words, (a)accelerated reading, spelling and phonemic awareness more rapidly than justlearning the letter sounds at an accelerated pace and (b) produced a higherproportion of mature orthographic spelling errors than in the other conditions.It was found that the strategies children use for decoding and encodingmirror the teaching methods they have experienced. Gradual analytiC phonicsteaching encourages phonetic cue reading, children only processing some of theletters and sounds in words. Explicit synthetic phonics teaching encourages earlycipher reading, children processing all of the letters and sounds in words. Thismethod teaches children how to use their knowledge of the alphabetic code todecode unknown words, thus establishing an orthographic memory for suchwords.