July 17th ~ Which Teachers Have the Most Language Knowledge? USA, Canada, England, or New Zealand? (Answer in the Book Review), Also: Aligning Tier 1 & Tier 2; Vowel Tuning; Complex GPCs & More!
The Weekly Newsletter That Keeps You Informed of The Latest Reading Research
Welcome to the Reading Research Recap, a weekly newsletter featuring the latest reading research published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The goal of the Recap is to share recent scientific findings and foster an appreciation of science as a way to navigate the world. I try to make this one of the most informative emails you get each week. If you enjoy this issue, please share it. I am always interested in improving the newsletter and welcome feedback.
Welcome! This is Issue No. 10
“Nothing in science has any value to society if it is not communicated…”
~Anne Roe, The Making of a Scientist
✏️Notes
Here’s What The Recap Covers Today
International results on teacher language knowledge (scroll to book review)
Does aligning Tier 1 & Tier 2 comp. instruction for 4th graders with RD work?
What is “Vowel Tuning”? Why might it be impaired in children with Dyslexia?
Which early reading skill moderated an intervention teaching complex GPCs
The surprising amount of variance that preschool literacy skills explained 9 years later (in a sample of Norwegian children)
📊Research
Vowel Tuning in Typically-developing Children and Children with Dyslexia
Some theories of reading development posit that typically-developing readers are sensitive to the variation in letter-sound pairings in a language: as they are exposed to the letter-sounds, they “absorb” information on frequency and apply it to new words. The overall process is called “statistical learning” and the specific process of learning vowel sounds of different letter combinations is known as “vowel tuning.” In this clever study, the researchers presented words that varied in condition and vowel GPCs:
“A child in the strong 80%–20% condition of oo as /u/ would see the words hoot, boot, shoot, and spook (representing /u/) and foot (representing /ʊ/), whereas in the strong 80%–20% condition of oo as /ʊ/ the child would see foot, book, look, and shook (representing /ʊ/) and spook (representing /u/) repeated 4 times each day over the 3 days (12 exposures/word). Children’s response (i.e., correct or incorrect) was recorded for each exposure to a word yielding 12 responses per word.”
Results: Compared to TD readers, children with Dyslexia were not picking up on the different frequencies of letter-sounds presented, perhaps because of “insufficient attention on individual letters.”
Practical Implications:
The design of the study limits some practical implications:
“For example, it is not clear whether both pronunciations of a GPC should be taught early in instruction or whether focus should first be placed on strengthening the high-frequency GPC pronunciation followed by the associated low-frequency GPC pronunciation.
The authors do suggest that children with Dyslexia could develop vowel “flexibility” through programs such as PHAST which teaches a strategy called “vowel alert.”
Citation: Laura M. Steacy, PhD, Yaacov Petscher, PhD, James D. Elliott, BA, ...(2020). The Effect of Facilitative Versus Inhibitory Word Training Corpora on Word Reading Accuracy Growth in Children With Dyslexia. Learning Disability Quarterly. Link.
Preschool Phonological, Morphological and Semantic Skills Explain it All
This longitudinal sample followed 323 Norwegian children across development. They used structural equation models to show that preschool language abilities explained nearly 70% of the variance in reading comprehension 9 years later. However, it is important to note that the Norwegian orthography is less complex than English. Citation: Snowling, M., & Hulme, C. (2020). Preschool phonological, morphological and semantic skills explain it all: Following reading development through a 9-year period. Journal of Research in Reading. Link to full paper!
*Note: this study came out last October (2019) but was just assigned to an issue recently. I am moving to an online-first system (presenting research as soon as it is made public) but I didn’t notice this one until after the fact, so I’m keeping it in.
Complex GPC Instruction Works for Poor Readers with High Phonological Awareness
Rationale: to understand the “nature and number of GPCs that should be taught to young children.”
Sample: English-speaking at-risk poor readers (n = 219) in Canadian schools
Method: quasi-experimental (children were randomized at the school level)
Intervention: 12-15 hours over 12 week of complex GPC instruction based on the Simplicity Principle (the Simplicity Principle is a way of teaching GPCs in the most efficient/optimal manner based on frequency- there is a full paper here on it.)
Control: the control group received instruction that did bring explicit attention to the specific phoneme associated with the grapheme
Results: “Hierarchical ANCOVA models showed that “…some at-risk children in Grade 2 with stronger phonemic awareness may benefit from being taught complex GPCs…”
Citation: Savage, R., Georgiou, G., Parrila, R., Maiorino, K., Dunn, K., & Burgos, G. (2019). The effects of teaching complex grapheme-phoneme correspondences: Evidence from a dual site cluster trial with at-risk grade 2 students. Scientific Studies of Reading, 1-17. Link.
Aligning Tier 2 Reading Comprehension Intervention with Tier 1 Instruction for 4th grade Struggling Readers
*Note: I usually don’t quote as much as this, but the details of the intervention are key to the study and I didn’t want to paraphrase and leave out a critical detail
Purpose: “This study examined the relative effects of a set of vocabulary and comprehension practices—aimed at improving reading comprehension—provided to students during T1-T2 instruction, Tier 2 alone, or business as usual (BAU).”
Sample: 36 fourth-grade teachers; 147 struggling (those that didn’t pass the EOY 3rd grade reading assessment) fourth-grade readers (48 in the aligned Tier 1-Tier 2 condition; 49 in the non-aligned Tier 2 condition; and 50 in the business as usual condition).
Method: three-arm quasi-experimental study
Intervention:
“The Tier 1 comprehension instruction occurred during social studies classes. All schools in all conditions utilized the state adopted social studies curriculum.”
“In the aligned T1-T2 condition, teachers implemented STRIVE (Swanson et al., 2019), a set of Tier 1 content area comprehension practices across three 6-week units of social studies instruction.”
“In the BAU condition, the struggling readers identified at each school received the typical intervention provided by the school.”
Results: the aligned Tier 1- Tier 2 group outperformed the other groups for proximal (immediate) measures of content knowledge and vocabulary, but no (statistically significant) differences were found on standardized measures of reading comprehension
Citation: Stevens, E. A., Vaughn, S., Swanson, E., & Scammacca, N. (2020). Examining the Effects of a Tier 2 Reading Comprehension Intervention Aligned to Tier 1 Instruction for Fourth-Grade Struggling Readers. Exceptional Children. Link.
New Book
Citation: Teaching Literacy in the Twenty-First Century Classroom: Teacher Knowledge, Self-Efficacy, and Minding the Gap Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Link.
At $109 USD I can’t recommend purchasing this book (seriously, who do they think has the money for these?) But, there was an especially interesting chapter (reviewed below) on the differences in language knowledge across US, Canadian, English, and New Zealand teachers!
Do Teacher Candidates in English-Speaking Countries Understand the Structure of the English Language?
Teacher candidates in 4 countries were given the Survey of Basic Language Constructs
I know you are dying to know the results…so, I won’t bore you with a lot of details about the methods…but the sample sizes are important to note: Canada (n = 80); England (n = 55); New Zealand (n = 26); USA (n = 118).
Who came out on top?
Canada!
Canadian teacher candidates outperformed all other countries in knowledge, ability, and total items
Total survey results: CAN (M = .67, SD = .45), ENG (M = .49, SD = .12), NZ (M= .56, SD = .50), U.S. (M = .50, SD = .49)
Teacher candidates in New Zealand and Canada outperformed US and English teacher candidates
US teacher candidates outperformed England on phonological and phonemic items (perhaps because the US’ National Reading Panel report focuses more on phonemic awareness than England’s Rose Report); England did better than US teachers on phonics and morphology items
In terms of total survey items, the US and England performed similarly
All groups did better on phonics-based items than morphology items (perhaps because none of the national initiatives discuss morphology as much as phonics)
However, “…no sample of teacher candidates demonstrated a strong understanding of basic language constructs…mean percent correct scores were all below 70%…”
You might want to share these results with you favorite Canadian reading teacher/specialist/tutor :)
A few other thoughts
I wish they would have included more countries. Would be cool to see how Australia compared.
The beginning of the chapter included a really nice overview of the different literacy reports/legislation in each of the 4 aforementioned countries. I always wondered about how different English-speaking countries teach reading, and this was a great introduction. The reports focus on different areas, though there is some overlap.
Other chapters
I read three other chapters in the book that looked interesting. There were some sobering quotes about teachers not feeling prepared:
“Not only do teacher candidates feel under-prepared to teach foundational literacy skills, but they also feel genuinely ill-equipped to assess students’ reading abilities.”
and some stats about poor teacher prep:
“According to the National Council on Teacher Quality (2018), fewer than four in ten professors taught the components of effective reading instruction.”
Here are some of the solution/conclusions the authors offered: better mentorship, more opportunities for teacher trial and error, more discussion of experiences, more and diverse practicum experiences.
Okay, have a good weekend everyone!
-Neena