Terezinha Nunes

Learning Morphological and Phonological Spelling Rules: An Intervention Study

We looked at the effects of teaching 7- and 8-year-old children morphological and phonological distinctions. Some of those given morphological training and some of those given phonological training were also taught how to represent these distinctions in writing. All 4 intervention groups did better than the control group in a standardized test of reading after the intervention. There were gains in childrens use of morphological spelling rules but not in their use of conditional phonologically based spelling rules. The improvement in the use of morphological rules in spelling was confined to groups trained in morphology. Training in phonology also had a beneficial effect on the use of morphology in reading. The results are interpreted within the framework of a dual-route model of learning to read and spell.

Learning and teaching mathematics : an international perspective

T. Nunes, B. Bryant, About this Book: A Brief Overview. Part I: Mathematics and Intelligence. Part II: The Development of Mathematical Understandings. Part III: Social and Cultural Influences on Mathematical Learning. Part IV: Constructing Knowledge in the Classroom.

Handbook of children's literacy

Al. Childhood Conceptions of Literacy.- A2. Phonology and Spelling.- A3. Linguistic Processes in Reading and Spelling: The Case of Alphabetic Writing Systems: English, French, German and Spanish.- A4. Connectionist Models of Childrens Reading.- A5. Morphology and Spelling.- A6. Childrens Self-Perception as Readers.- B1. The Development of Comprehension Skills.- B2. Text and Cognition.- B3. The Use of Context in Learning to Read.- B4. Reading Stories.- B5. Computers and Writing.- Cl. Reading and Spelling Difficulties.- C2. The Concept of Dyslexia.- C3. Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence from Brain Research.- C4. Epidemiology: Genetic and Social Influences on Reading Ability.- C5. Reading Comprehension Difficulties.- C6. Early Identification.- C7. Early Intervention.- C8. Individual Differences in Dyslexia.- C9. Specific Speech and Language Difficulties and Literacy.- C10. Reading by Touch in Blind Children and Adults.- C11. Deafness and Reading.- Introduction: Teaching Literacy: What Practices, When and Why?.- D1. Literacy in Time and Space: Issues, Concepts and Definitions.- D2. Teaching Reading: A Historical Approach.- D3. The Cognitive Consequences of Literacy.- D4. Comparative Studies of Instructional Methods.- D5. Early Emergent Literacy.- D6. The Linguistic Consequences of Literacy.- El. Phonological Awareness and Learning to Read: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective.- E2. Morphology, Reading and Spelling: Looking Across Languages.- E3. Bilingualism and Reading.- E4. Grammatical Awareness Across Languages and the Role of Social Context: Evidence from English and Hebrew.- E5. Literacy, Socialisation and the Social Order.- E6. Segmentation in the Writing of Mayan Language Statements by Indigenous Children with Primary Schooling.- E7. Paths to Literacy for Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) Users.

Children's Understanding of the Formal and Functional Characteristics of Written Chinese.

Chinese script is often viewed as an exception to the processes of language learning in that it is presumed to be learned by rote. However, recent psycholinguistic investigations describing the formal and functional constraints of Chinese script have offered a new direction for a cognitive analysis of its acquisition. We investigated childrens understanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in a task of judgment of orthographic acceptability and a creative spelling task. The formal constraint we examined was the fixed position of stroke patterns and their function as either a semantic radical (giving a clue to meaning) or a phonological component (giving a clue to pronunciation). The children (aged 4 to 9) attended either kindergarten or primary school in Hong Kong. Our results indicated that 6-year-olds could already use the positional rule to reject nonwords (which violate the formal constraint of position) as unacceptable, whereas pseudowords (which do not violate this constraint) were judged as acceptable. Significant effects of age and orthographic acceptability were observed. The task of creative writing replicated this trend and showed that, from age 6, the children were able to use semantic radicals to represent meaning. However, a more systematic use of phonological components as a clue to pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds. We conclude that learning to read and write in Chinese is not simply accomplished by the rote memorization of individual characters: rather, as children progress in learning, they develop an understanding of the underlying rules of written Chinese.

Learning To Spell Regular and Irregular Verbs.

Several conventional spelling sequences for morphemes do not conform to letter-sound correspondence rules. One example is the ‘-ed’ spelling for the inflectional morpheme at the end of English past verbs. Previous work has shown a close relationship between children’s awareness of grammatical distinctions and their success in learning about this spelling sequence. However, this research was with real verbs and the children’s spelling might have been influenced by familiarity with the words. To check this, we devised a task with pseudo-verbs. This is a novel use of pseudo-words, which hitherto have been a tool for testing letter-sound knowledge; here the spellings violated letter-sound relationships and followed a morphological pattern. The children heard passages with a pseudo-verb in the past tense and in other tenses and had to write the pseudo-verb in the past tense. The task contained both regular pseudo-verbs, whose stem was the same in the present and past tense, and irregular pseudo-verbs, which had different stems in the present and the past tense. The children’s scores in a grammatical awareness task predicted their use of the ‘-ed’ spelling sequence over a 21 month period. The children also used ‘-ed’ endings significantly more often in regular than irregular pseudo-verbs. We conclude that the use of ‘-ed’ endings for regular verbs reflects a morphological spelling strategy based on children’s grammatical awareness.

Deaf children's social relationships in mainstream schools

Abstract Arguments supporting the integration of deaf pupils in mainstream schools are often based on possible cognitive gains, but it has been suggested that integration should also be assessed in terms of its social consequences for pupils. If deaf pupils are rejected or feel isolated in mainstream schools, their education may ultimately suffer. We investigated the social adaptation of nine deaf pupils in two mainstream schools using three methods: peer ratings, sociometric status and interviews. The average peer ratings received by deaf pupils were not significantly different from those of hearing pupils. Thus these deaf pupils were not more disliked by their peers. However, they were significantly more likely to be neglected by their peers and less likely to have a friend in the classroom. Hearing pupils who were friends of deaf pupils described their friendship as involving pro-social functions whereas many who had no deaf friends found communication an obstacle to friendship. We conclude that, although deaf pupils are not rejected in mainstream schools, they may feel isolated. It is possible that schools can have a proactive role in helping hearing pupils learn how to overcome communication barriers and develop more positive attitudes towards deaf pupils.

Tools for thought: the measurement of length and area

Abstract Childrens ability to solve measurement problems was studied in two experiments. We hypothesized that childrens reasoning would be significantly influenced by the measuring tool used. In the case of length, the conventional tool (ruler) was expected to support reasoning more effectively than the nonconventional tool (string). In the case of area, the conventional procedure (measuring length and width and multiplying) was expected to prove more demanding than the use of the nonconventional tool (bricks) because of its indirect relationship to the dimension measured. Both predictions were supported by the findings, which cannot be explained only in terms of the childrens developmental level.

The contribution of logical reasoning to the learning of mathematics in primary school

It has often been claimed that childrens mathematical understanding is based on their ability to reason logically, but there is no good evidence for this causal link. We tested the causal hypothesis about logic and mathematical development in two related studies. In a longitudinal study, we showed that (a) 6-year-old childrens logical abilities and their working memory predict mathematical achievement 16 months later; and (b) logical scores continued to predict mathematical levels after controls for working memory, whereas working memory scores failed to predict the same measure after controls for differences in logical ability. In our second study, we trained a group of children in logical reasoning and found that they made more progress in mathematics than a control group who were not given this training. These studies establish a causal link between logical reasoning and mathematical learning. Much of childrens mathematical knowledge is based on their understanding of its underlying logic.

Young Children's Understanding of Division: The Relationship between Division Terms in a Noncomputational Task.

The authors investigated development of the concept of division in young children. Experiment 1 examined whether children who can share are able to understand the inverse divisor-quotient relationship in partitive division tasks when asked to judge the relative size of 2 shared sets. Experiment 2 investigated whether young children understand the same inverse relation in quotitive tasks in which they were asked to judge the relative number of sets to be formed. The ability to compare share-outs and to take into account the inverse divisor-quotient relationship was present in approximately half of the 6-year-olds; age improvements were significant between 5 and 7 years. Partitive tasks, which are more similar to sharing, were easier than quotitive tasks, which seem to involve the coordination between sharing and part-whole concepts. This is evidence that childrens initial understanding of division might be based on the action schema of sharing.

The role of different levels of phonological awareness in the development of reading and spelling in Greek

Phonological awareness is a strong predictor of childrens progress in literacy acquisition. There are different ways of segmenting words into sound sequences – syllables, phonemes, onset-rime – and little is known about whether these different levels of segmentation vary in their contribution to reading and writing. Does one of them – for example, phoneme awareness – play the major role in learning to read and spell making the other phonological units irrelevant to the prediction of reading? Or do different levels of analysis make independent contributions to reading and spelling?Our study investigated whether syllable and phoneme awareness make independent contributions to reading and spelling in Greek. Four measures were used: syllable awareness, phoneme awareness, reading and spelling. Analyses of variance showed that Greek speaking children found it easier to analyse words into syllables than phonemes, irrespective of the influence of task variables such as position of the phonological element, word length, and placement of stress in the word. Regression analyses showed that syllable and phoneme awareness make significant and independent contributions to learning written Greek. We conclude that phonological awareness is a multidimensional phenomenon and that the different dimensions contribute to reading and writing in Greek.