Hye K. Pae

A Randomized Control Study of Instructional Approaches for Struggling Adult Readers

Abstract This study measured the effectiveness of various instructional approaches on the reading outcomes of 198 adults who read single words at the 3.0 through 5.9 grade equivalency levels. The students were randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: Decoding and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, and Fluency; Decoding, Comprehension, Fluency, and Extensive Reading; Extensive Reading; and a Control/Comparison approach. The Control/Comparison approach employed a curriculum common to community-based adult literacy programs, and the Extensive Reading approach focused on wide exposure to literature. The Fluency component was a guided repeated oral reading approach, and the Decoding/Comprehension components were SRA/McGraw-Hill Direct Instruction Corrective Reading Programs. Results indicated continued weaknesses in and poor integration of participants’ skills. Although students made significant gains independent of reading instruction group, all improvements were associated with small effect sizes. When reading instruction group was considered, only one significant finding was detected, with the Comparison/Control group, the Decoding and Fluency group, and the Decoding, Comprehension, Extensive Reading, and Fluency group showing stronger word attack outcomes than the Extensive Reading group.

Measuring adult literacy students’ reading skills using the Gray Oral Reading Test

There are not enough reading tests standardized on adults who have very low literacy skills, and therefore tests standardized on children are frequently administered. This study addressed the complexities and problems of using a test normed on children to measure the reading comprehension skills of 193 adults who read at approximately third through fifth grade reading grade equivalency levels. Findings are reported from an analysis of the administration of Form A of the Gray Oral Reading Tests—Fourth Edition (Wiederholt & Bryant, 2001a, b). Results indicated that educators and researchers should be very cautious when interpreting test results of adults who have difficulty reading when children’s norm-referenced tests are administered.

Is Korean a syllabic alphabet or an alphabetic syllabary

This article supplies a critical overview of Korean with respect to writing system, orthography, phonology, and morphology as well as the role of vowels for the purpose of clarifying inconsistently used terms in the literature. An inaccurate terminology may plague interpretations and conclusions drawn from research studies. The Korean writing system is unique in that it relies on the alphabetic principle but the visual representation and processing unit are syllable oriented. According to Rogers [(1995). Optimal orthographies. In I. Taylor and D. R. Olson (eds), Scripts and Literacy. Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 45–58], an optimal writing system should be easily acquired by the beginning reader and efficient for the skilled reader. These criteria arguably are met for Korean Hangul. It is argued that Korean is best viewed as an alphabetic syllabary or alphasyllabary rather than as a syllabic alphabet. Supporting evidence for this perspective is provided.

Animacy Effect and Language Specificity: Judgment of Unaccusative Verbs by Korean Learners of English as a Foreign Language

This study investigated the tendency of overpassivization of unaccusative verbs by Korean learners of English as a foreign language (FL). Sixty Korean native college students participated in the study, along with 17 English-speaking counterparts serving as a comparison group. Consistent with the findings of previous research, this study found Korean students’ tendency to incorrectly accept passive-voice with inanimate subjects. The results of this study highlighted the role of lexical animacy, the hierarchy of agentivity, and language-specific effects on FL judgment. The findings of this study suggest a robust language-specific L1 effect on L2 acquisition and a greater involvement of cognition in FL use than language input.

The Resolution of Visual Noise in Word Recognition.

This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compared to that of native speakers of English, using normal, alternated, and inverse fonts. Sixty four adult students participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated similarities and differences in accuracy and latency among the three L1 groups. The participants, regardless of L1, had a greater advantage in nonwords than words for the normal fonts because they were able to efficiently detect the illegal letter strings. However, word advantages were observed in the visually distorted stimuli (i.e., alternated and inverse fonts). These results were explained from the perspectives of the theory of psycholinguistic grain size, L1–L2 distance, and the mechanism of familiarity discrimination. The native speakers of Chinese were more sensitive to visual distortions than the Korean counterpart, suggesting that the linguistic template established in L1 might play a role in word processing in English.

Cultural Capital Theory: A Study of Children Enrolled in Rural and Urban Head Start Programmes.

Children from different backgrounds have disparate access to cultural capital, which may influence their academic success. The purpose of this study was to examine the links between family background, home literacy experiences, and emergent literacy skills among preschoolers enrolled in Head Start programmes. The background characteristics studied included urbanicity, maternal education, ethnicity, and family size among 112 preschool children (59 rural and 53 urban, M age = 56.78 months). Findings showed that rural and urban preschoolers may have similar literacy abilities. However, when maternal education was controlled for, family background variables and components of the home literacy environment predicted emergent literacy skills differently for the two groups. Moreover, mothers active involvement and the childs own engagement in literacy seemed to play a salient role in early literacy development across groups.

The Woodcock Reading Mastery Test: Impact of Normative Changes

This study examined the magnitude of differences in standard scores, convergent validity, and concurrent validity when an individual’s performance was gauged using the revised and the normative update (Woodcock, 1998) editions of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test in which the actual test items remained identical but norms have been updated. From three metropolitan areas, 899 first to third grade students referred by their teachers for a reading intervention program participated. Results showed the inverse Flynn effect, indicating systematic inflation averaging 5 to 9 standard score points, regardless of gender, IQ, city site, or ethnicity, when calculated using the updated norms. Inflation was greater at lower raw score levels. Implications for using the updated norms for identifying children with reading disabilities and changing norms during an ongoing study are discussed.

Cross-language links between English and Korean in second-language reading acquisition

Factors related to second reading acquisition and the relationship between oral and literacy skills in the first language (L1) and second language (L2) were examined. Participants were kindergarten through second grade students who speak English as L1 and sequentially acquired Korean as L2. Measures included cognitive flexibility, oral language skills, and reading skills in both L1 and L2. The findings suggested that phonological awareness and verbal working memory process were significant predictors for the L2 reading attainment, regardless of differences in phonology and orthography across languages.

Another look at the role of vowel letters in word reading in L2 English among native Korean readers

Abstract While evidence shows that consonants play a primary role over vowels in reading Roman script, it remains unclear whether this primacy extends to reading non-Roman script. This study investigated the role of vowels in L2 English word reading among native Korean readers. Seventy six Korean- and English-speaking adults read words in a naming test. Stimuli included four conditions: lowercase, uppercase, letter strings with no vowels (e.g., cmmn for common), and letter strings with randomly missing letters (e.g., corct for correct). Overall, the vowel deletion manipulation gave rise to higher accuracy and faster reading than the random omission condition for the two groups. When the baseline was controlled, the group and condition variables jointly affected accuracy, but the condition and L1 script are independent of each other for latency. Results suggest that the consonant letter primacy observed in Roman script may not fully extend to other alphabetic languages.

Stroop interference associated with efficient reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing.

ABSTRACT The Stroop Color–Word Test involves a dynamic interplay between reading and executive functioning that elicits intuitions of word reading automaticity. One such intuition is that strong reading skills (i.e., more automatized word reading) play a disruptive role within the test, contributing to Stroop interference. However, evidence has accumulated that challenges this intuition. The present study examined associations among Stroop interference, reading skills (i.e., isolated word identification, grapheme-to-phoneme mapping, phonemic awareness, reading fluency) measured on standardized tests, and orthographic skills measured on experimental computerized tasks. Among university students (N = 152), correlational analyses showed greater Stroop interference to be associated with (a) relatively low scores on all standardized reading tests, and (b) longer response latencies on orthographic tasks. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that reading fluency and prelexical orthographic processing predicted unique and significant variance in Stroop interference beyond baseline rapid naming. Results suggest that strong reading skills, including orthographic processing, play a supportive role in resolving Stroop interference.