Reading and Writing

We examined Nonsense-Passage oral reading in adults, using data derived from new and previously published studies (Finucci et al 1976, Gross-Glenn et al 1985). Time-scores and error-frequency data are presented for five samples of non-dyslexic readers with a minimum of a high-school education and no childhood history of dyslexia (N=127). Considerable uniformity is demonstrated across these samples, and reading performance of non-dyslexic individuals contrasts sharply with that observed in four samples of adult familial dyslexics. Both affected and compensated-affected dyslexic subjects read the passages significantly more slowly and with more errors than did nondyslexic readers. Results are discussed in relation to the cognitive and neural processes that may underlie this specific reading difficulty in dyslexics. We have found Nonsense-Passage reading to be especially useful in family studies of inherited dyslexia as a means of quantifying oral reading deficits in adults who have learned to compensate for their children reading difficulties.

In this paper, we review several lines of convergent research to discuss the relationship between developmental dyslexia and slow symbol naming speed. We describe the interactive development of orthographic and phonological codes, and we discuss the methodological problems that may have led to underestimating the importance of individual differences in orthographic processing in our account of reading disabilities. Symbol naming speed is typically subsumed under phonological processing, yet it contributes variance to reading, especially to reading fluency, independently of phonological awareness. We speculate that naming speed may reflect precise timing mechanisms necessary to the development of orthographic codes and to their integration with phonological codes. We argue that an understanding of this precise timing dimension is necessary to incorporate in our models of phonological, orthographic, and semantic processes in reading acquisition and reading failure.

Shankweiler and colleagues argue that text comprehensionproblems in young children arise from phonological processingdifficulties. Their work has focused on children with poor wordreading ability. We investigated this hypothesis for children whoexperience comprehension difficulties in the presence of age-appropriate word reading skills. We found that good and poorcomprehenders performed comparably on various measures ofphonological processing and differed on a task that made greaterdemands on working memory, Bradley and Bryant's odd-word-outtask. In a final study, hierarchical regression analyses supportedthis distinction: the odd-word-out task was a strong predictor ofreading comprehension performance even after IQ, vocabulary and single word reading had been controlled for, but a lessmemory-dependent phonological task was not. These studiessupport previous work which indicates that poor comprehenders'problems arise from higher-level processing difficulties.

A random sample of language arts, social studies, science, and math high school teachers from across the United States were surveyed about their use of writing to support student learning. Four out of every five teachers reported they used writing to support student learning, applying on average 24 different writing activities across the school year, with nine activities applied by at least one-half of the teachers once a month or more often. Teachers’ responses, however, raised several concerns. One, a majority of teachers indicted they did not receive adequate preservice or inservice preparation on how to use writing to support learning (this issue was especially acute for science and math teachers). Two, many of the nine most commonly applied writing to learn activities involved little or no analysis, interpretation, or personalization of information to be learned. Three, use of writing activities involving the use of digital tools, report writing, and written arguments were infrequent. Such activities are stressed by the Common Core State Standards. Four, when respondents taught students how to apply writing to learn activities, they only used effective teaching practices slightly more than one half of the time (math teachers did this even less often). We further found that use of writing to support learning was related to teachers’ preparation to apply such strategies, perceptions of capabilities to teach and use these tools, and percent of below average students in the class.

In this study, the reading comprehension of deaf children and adolescents in the Netherlands is examined along with their word identification. The reading comprehension of 464 deaf students and the word identification of 504 deaf students between 6 and 20 years of age was examined. The results show the reading comprehension scores of deaf children to be far below the scores of hearing children. On average, the deaf subjects scored at a level equivalent to a hearing child in the first grade. The word identification scores of the deaf children, however, were almost equivalent to the scores of hearing children. Although reading comprehension and word identification appear to be related, this relation does not completely explain the comprehension difficulties encountered by deaf children. Additional factors are required to explain deaf children’s difficulties with reading comprehension.

Argumentative writing has long been considered an essential skill for disciplinary learning. For researchers and curriculum developers to develop ecologically valid instructional approaches to argumentative writing, a pivotal prerequisite is the understanding of how teachers use various instructional methods in tandem to teach different argumentative components. This exploratory study identified instructional patterns for the teaching and learning of argumentative writing by observing 187 English language arts class sessions taught by 31 highly regarded high school English language arts teachers (529 students; 40% of the students were males). Multidimensional scaling identified three instructional patterns that vary in the level of teacher centeredness and dialogic interaction. These instructional patterns may reflect the occurrence of explicit teaching, dialogic learning, and in-class writing that was sometimes accompanied with teacher conferencing or coaching. Common across all of these practices was the teaching of claim and evidence. Warranting, counterargument, and response to counterargument, which are more complex forms of argumentation, tended to be taught by instructional practices involving low- to mid-level teacher centeredness and high-level dialogic interaction (e.g., small grouping, discussion). Overall, our findings highlight the gaps between what researchers suggest as effective approaches to teaching argumentative writing and how argumentative writing is currently taught in classrooms.

In written French, the acquisition of the nominal plural (-s) occurs earlier and faster than the acquisition of the verbal plural (-nt) (Totereau, Thevenin & Fayol, 1997, Learning to Spell). The reasons for this difference are not well known. The objective of the present research is to test two alternative hypotheses, which may provide an account of this difference by exploiting a particularity of written French: The agreement of adjectives. According to the first hypothesis, the nominal plural is acquired before the verbal plural because it is semantically grounded, unlike the latter. According to the second, the early emergence of noun agreements is due to the fact that -s occurs more consistently than -nt. These two hypotheses lead to different predictions, that can be tested empirically, with regard to the agreement of adjectives. These predictions were studied in three experiments using sentences recall or completion tasks presented to children from 7 to 10 years old. The results confirm the semantic hypothesis but reveal an impact of consistency on performance.

This study compared the sentence hyperbole comprehension performance of Chinese poor readers with various levels of arithmetic proficiency. A total of 168 Chinese poor readers in Grade 1 were recruited, and their nonverbal intelligence, verbal working memory, Chinese receptive vocabulary, Chinese grammatical knowledge, character reading and morphological awareness were controlled. The reaction times of these students in correctly answering literal and inferential questions was selected for further comparison. Results of a mixed-effect model analysis show that the participants with good and poor arithmetic proficiency levels demonstrated similar levels of literal information comprehension, regardless of the presentation form of the quantifier construction that was built by the quantifier location of the sentences, the number of numeric characters in a single quantifier and the hyperbole function applied in the sentence quantifier. Students with good arithmetic proficiency also demonstrated faster response in comprehending quantifier inferential information. Primary school students with good arithmetic proficiency outperformed those with poor proficiency in the inferential reading of verbal numeric information. In addition, differences in arithmetic proficiency did not significantly affect the students’ word/character semantic representation cognition and shallow literal information processing. Overall, the results distinguish the interaction and independent numerical information processes at the literal and inferential levels of text quantifier comprehension for young primary school students with poor reading proficiency.