Anne E. Cunningham

Early reading acquisition and its relation to reading experience and ability 10 years later.

A group of 1st-graders who were administered a battery of reading tasks in a previous study were followed up as 11th graders. Ten years later, they were administered measures of exposure to print, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and general knowledge. First-grade reading ability was a strong predictor of all of the 11th-grade outcomes and remained so even when measures of cognitive ability were partialed out. First-grade reading ability (as well as 3rd- and 5th-grade ability) was reliably linked to exposure to print, as assessed in the 11th grade, even after 11th-grade reading comprehension ability was partialed out, indicating that the rapid acquisition of reading ability might well help develop the lifetime habit of reading, irrespective of the ultimate level of reading comprehension ability that the individual attains. Finally, individual differences in exposure to print were found to predict differences in the growth in reading comprehension ability throughout the elementary grades and thereafter.

Assessing Phonological Awareness in Kindergarten Children: Issues of Task Comparability

Ten different phonological awareness tasks were administered to a group of kindergarten children whose reading ability was assessed 1 year later. The extraneous cognitive requirements inherent in the tasks varied widely. The children’s performance on three tasks that involved a rhyming response was at ceiling, and these tasks did not correlate with subsequent reading progress. The other seven measures were all moderately related to later reading ability and, employed in sets, were very strong predictors. The relative predictive accuracy of the phonological tasks was equal to or better than more global measures of cognitive skills such as an intelligence test and a reading readiness test. The phonological tasks had a large amount of common variance. Factor analysis revealed only one factor on which all the nonrhyming phonological tasks loaded highly. The results bolster the construct validity of phonological awareness, indicate considerable comparability and interchangeability among the tasks used to measure the construct, and are encouraging as regards the possible use of such tasks in predictive test batteries.

Explicit versus implicit instruction in phonemic awareness

Abstract Kindergarten and first-grade children received two forms of instruction in phonemic awareness: (1) a “skill and drill” approach where the procedural knowledge of segmentation and blending of phonemes were taught versus (2) a “metalevel” approach that explicitly emphasized the application, value, and utility of phonemic awareness for the activity of reading in addition to teaching the procedural knowledge of segmentation and blending. Forty-two kindergarten and 42 first-grade children (14 children each in the experimental groups or control group) received training twice a week for 10 weeks. The results of this training study supported the growing evidence that phonemic awareness is causally related to reading achievement at the beginning stages of reading development. Furthermore, although a significant improvement in reading achievement was observed for both experimental groups in kindergarten and first-grade children, the degree of improvement in reading ability of the first-grade children depended strongly upon the type of instruction received. That is, the children who reflected upon and discussed the value, application, and utility of phonemic awareness for the activity of reading at an explicit level performed significantly better on a transfer measure of reading achievement than the skill and drill experimental group. The implications of a metalevel or metacognitive form of instruction are discussed.

Assessing Print Exposure and Orthographic Processing Skill in Children: A Quick Measure of Reading Experience.

In a study of third- and fourth-grade children it was established that orthographic processing ability can account for variance in word recognition skill after the variance due to phonological processing has been partialed out. This independent orthographic variances was related to performance on a new measure of individual differences in exposure to print, the Title Recognition Test (TRT), that has a very brief administration time. Additionally, some of the orthographic processing variance linked to word recognition ability was not shared with either phonological processing measures or with print exposure

Studying the consequences of literacy within a literate society: The cognitive correlates of print exposure

Most studies of the cognitive consequences of literacy have attempted to compare the performance of literate individuals with that of illiterate individuals. We argue that it is not absolutely necessary to examine illiterates in order to study the cognitive consequences of reading experience because there is enormous variation in exposure to print even within a generally literate society. In the present study, we tested several methods of assessing differential exposure to print and demonstrated that all have significant correlations with measures of vocabulary, cultural knowledge, spelling ability, and verbal fluency. Several indicators of print exposure predicted variance in these knowledge domains even when general ability and reading-comprehension skill were statistically controlled. Our results, although correlational, suggest that print exposure is an independent contributor to the development of certain verbal skills.

Orthographic Learning during Reading: Examining the Role of Self-Teaching.

Thirty-four second grade children read target homophonic pseudowords (e.g., slurst/slirst) in the context of real stories in a test of the self-teaching theory of early reading acquisition. The degree of orthographic learning was assessed with three converging tasks: homophonic choice, spelling, and target naming. Each of the tasks indicated that orthographic learning had taken place because processing of target homophones (e.g., yait) was superior to that of their homophonic controls (e.g., yate). Consistent with the self-teaching hypothesis, we obtained a substantial correlation (r=.52) between orthographic learning and the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that neither RAN tasks nor general cognitive ability predicted variance in orthographic learning once the number of target homophones correctly decoded during story reading had been partialed out. In contrast, a measure of orthographic knowledge predicted variance in orthographic learning once the number of targets correctly decoded had been partialed. The development of orthographic knowledge appears to be not entirely parasitic on decoding ability. (c) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

Converging evidence for the concept of orthographic processing

Six different measures of orthographic processing (three different letter string choice tasks, two orthographic choice tasks, and a homophone choice task) were administered to thirty-nine children who had also been administered the word recognition subtest of the Metropolitan Achievement Test and a comprehensive battery of tasks assessing phonological processing skill (four measures of phonological sensitivity, nonword repetition, and pseudoword reading). The six orthographic tasks displayed moderate convergence – forming one reasonably coherent factor. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that a composite measure of orthographic processing skill predicted variance in word recognition after variance accounted for by the phonological processing measures had been partialed out. A measure of print exposure predictedvariance in orthographic processing after the variance in phonologicalprocessing had been partialed out.

Children's Literacy Environments and Early Word Recognition Subskills.

First-grade children completed a battery of tasks that included standardized measures of word recognition and spelling, measures of phonological and orthographic processing skill, and a short indicator of exposure to print via home literacy experiences. Phonological and orthographic processing skill were separable components of variance in word recognition. Orthographic processing ability accounted for variance in word recognition ability even after the variance in three phonological processing measures had been partialed. Additionally, variance in orthographic processing ability not explained by phonological abilities was reliably linked to differences in print exposure. The print exposure measure was not, however, linked to the measures of phonological processing. This finding was unexpected but it is consistent with some previous research. The theoretical implications of this result are discussed.

How Teachers Would Spend Their Time Teaching Language Arts The Mismatch Between Self-Reported and Best Practices

As teacher quality becomes a central issue in discussions of children’s literacy, both researchers and policy makers alike express increasing concern with how teachers structure and allocate their lesson time for literacy-related activities as well as with what they know about reading development, processes, and pedagogy. The authors examined the beliefs, literacy knowledge, and proposed instructional practices of 121 first-grade teachers. Through teacher self-reports concerning the amount of instructional time they would prefer to devote to a variety of language arts activities, the authors investigated the structure of teachers’ implicit beliefs about reading instruction and explored relationships between those beliefs, expertise with general or special education students, years of experience, disciplinary knowledge, and self-reported distribution of an array of instructional practices. They found that teachers’ implicit beliefs were not significantly associated with their status as a regular or special education teacher, the number of years they had been teaching, or their disciplinary knowledge. However, it was observed that subgroups of teachers who highly valued particular approaches to reading instruction allocated their time to instructional activities associated with other approaches in vastly different ways. It is notable that the practices of teachers who privileged reading literature over other activities were not in keeping with current research and policy recommendations. Implications and considerations for further research are discussed.

The development of the relation between letter-naming speed and reading ability

A discrete-trial reaction time methodology was employed in order to measure the speed with which two groups of first-grade children (one tested twice during the school year) named letters. The relation of letter-naming speed to reading ability, although statistically significant, was much smaller than that observed in previous research in which a continuous-list procedure was employed. It was suggested that this procedure inflates the correlation because it involves many other psychological processes in addition to name retrieval speed. A third-grade group also displayed a weak correlation, but the relationship was reasonably strong in a fifth-grade group. The presence of a strong relationship in groups as advanced in reading as fifth-graders is probably more indicative of differential experience with text than it is of a causal role for name retrieval speed in determining reading ability.