Reading and Writing最新文献

While there is some evidence of a gap in English writing achievement between children with English as an additional language (EAL) compared to their monolingual English-speaking (EL1) peers, the source of this gap remains unclear. This study examines whether writing presents a specific challenge for children with EAL beyond their oral language and reading skills, and whether the factors affecting writing skills differ between EAL and EL1 groups. In a longitudinal design, 100 children aged 9 to 10 years completed a fiction writing task and single-word spelling task twice over a school year. They also completed a non-fiction writing task, and measures of nonverbal intelligence, receptive vocabulary, expressive and receptive oral language, decoding, and reading comprehension. Children with EAL demonstrated lower general writing performance than monolinguals, commensurate with their other language and reading skills, but a relative strength in single-word spelling. Predictors were similar for children with EAL and monolinguals, with decoding skill predicting spelling and writing, and expressive oral language predicting writing. Effects of genre and specific writing sub-skills are also discussed, as well as implications for closing the writing attainment gap.

Preschool children often confuse letters with their mirror images when they try to read and write. Mirror confusion seems to occur more often in line with the direction of script (e.g., left-to-right for the Latin alphabetic script), suggesting that the processing of letter orientation and text directionality may be interrelated in preliterate age. When children go to school, mirror mistakes in writing/reading letters disappear. Here we ask whether the processing of letter shapes and text direction are still related in readers at different proficiency levels. Literate subjects – school children from the 1st and 4th grades and adults – decided under time pressure whether a displayed letter was oriented correctly or incorrectly (mirrored). We observed that reaction times were faster when a letter was oriented rightward, i.e. in line with the cultural text direction (left-to-right), but we did not find any differences between the groups. We conclude that, even if mirror mistakes disappear during primary school years, letter shapes are still processed in a close relation to the left-to-right reading direction in the Latin script.

We investigated the comorbidity of low language and reading skills in 6- to 8-year-old monolingual Polish-speaking children (N = 962) using three different approaches: norming data to determine the prevalence of co-morbid difficulties, group comparisons of profiles on key cognitive-linguistic measures, and a case series analysis examining the frequency of single versus multiple deficits. We identified four groups of children based on their oral language and reading skills: children with low oral language skills alone, low reading skills alone, comorbid low language/reading skills, and typically developing chronological-age controls. We characterized the four groups (n = 38 per group) in terms of oral language and reading skills measured with normed test batteries, and in terms of the cognitive-linguistic profiles measured by the phonological awareness test (PA), rapid automatized naming test (RAN), and nonword repetition tests (NWR). We found that 24–31% of children with one type of difficulty had comorbid difficulties in the other domain. All groups differed significantly in cognitive-linguistic profiles. For each measure, the comorbid group had the lowest results. The group of children with isolated low language skills had better results than the comorbid group in (1) Sentence repetition (sub-test in an oral language test), (2) discrimination-based, blending-based, and elision-based PA sub-tests, (3) RAN (both digits and letters). The group with isolated low reading skills had better results than the comorbid group in: (1) discrimination-based PA sub-test, (2) NWR tests. The results indicate differences in cognitive-linguistic profiles between the groups with low language and/or low reading skills. They highlight the need to control for both types of difficulties in researching low language and/or reading skills, and to screen for comorbid issues while diagnosing children.

This paper presents the adaptation of the POMAS classification of spelling errors (Silliman et al., Developmental Neuropsychology 29:93–123, 2006, Bahr et al., Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research 55:1587–1599, 2012; International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 18:73–91, 2015) to Polish orthography. We identified the most common phonological, orthographic, and/or morphological errors committed by Polish Grade 1 spellers based on a writing-to-dictation task. Some of the error types were included in the original POMAS; some we added, following the classification rationale, to adapt the classification to the specific features of the Polish orthography. Moreover, we found that the participants made, on average, an equal number of phonological and orthographic errors, and of phonological and morphological errors. However, orthographic errors were more frequent than morphological ones. A roughly equal proportion of orthographic and phonological errors occurred in the spelling of the most difficult words. The most frequent orthographic error type was grapheme substitution, followed by final consonant devoicing, and consonant devoicing within a word errors. The most frequent phonological error type were misspellings in diacritic signs, followed by consonant deletion, vowel deletion, and epenthesis. The developed POMAS-PL version may be used by other researchers of Slavic languages, to allow for intercultural comparisons. Moreover, our analyses can be used by teachers of Polish as a first and a second language to anticipate their students’ errors and to understand what knowledge the learners need to learn to spell correctly.

Narrative skills play an important role in children’s reading, communication, and critical thinking. Most studies on narrative skills are based on monolingual children from middle- to upper middle-class populations and few have examined bilingual children’s narratives outside of the western context. These factors may impose different sociocultural influences on children’s storytelling abilities. The current study focuses on English–Mandarin bilingual children in Singapore and explores: (1) how English–Mandarin bilinguals apply their Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency to a given narrative task and (2) the compensatory strategies they employ in their Mandarin narratives. Data was obtained from 186 K1 pre-schoolers (85 boys and 101 girls) aged four to five. Children’s Mandarin narrative skills were assessed with the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN; Gagarina et al. in ZAS Pap Linguist 56:155–155, 2012. https://doi.org/10.21248/zaspil.56.2019.414). Their macrostructural knowledge (e.g., story grammar) was scored with the MAIN coding scheme, and their microstructural knowledge (e.g., mean length of utterance) was calculated with CLAN. Children’s Mandarin lexical-grammatical proficiency (i.e., receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and semantic fluency) was assessed with standard tests. The results indicate that compared to children’s microstructural knowledge, their macrostructural knowledge was more influenced by their Mandarin competence. Children used a variety of strategies to compensate for their limited Mandarin competence, and the most frequently used ones were generalisation (e.g., all classifiers of nouns were “个”), codeswitching (at both the word and sentential levels), and sentential structural transfer.

Repeated reading (RR) is often recommended for promoting reading fluency, but it is unclear whether continuous texts or word lists should be used. This study tested whether the effects of RR depend on the reading material and whether these effects interact with students’ prior abilities. N = 304 primary school students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: (1) a repeated reading group receiving continuous texts (RR-T), (2) a repeated reading group receiving word lists (RR-W), and (3) a control group (CG). Before and after the training (M = 13 sessions), students’ reading fluency and reading motivation were assessed. In both RR-groups, the average level and growth in (a) words read correctly per minute and (b) affect were recorded during each reading session. Multilevel modelling revealed that growth in reading fluency and reading motivation did not differ significantly between the RR groups and the CG. Process analyses showed that the number of words students read correctly per minute increased significantly per session. Students’ affect remained stable at a high level throughout the reading interventions. In the RR-T, significantly more words were read correctly than in the RR-W, and this was a mediator between group and reading fluency. Students’ initial levels of reading performance and reading motivation strongly predicted both process and outcome variables, but not in interaction with the reading material. Results emphasise the importance of investigating the effects of repeated reading interventions with higher dosage and of offering differentiated methods (instead of reading material) to struggling readers.

The rise of the digital era has led to a decline in handwriting as the primary mode of communication, resulting in negative effects on handwriting literacy, particularly in complex writing systems such as Chinese. The marginalization of handwriting has contributed to the deterioration of penmanship, defined as the ability to write aesthetically and legibly. Despite penmanship being widely acknowledged as a crucial factor in predicting language literacy, research on its evaluation remains limited, with existing assessments primarily dependent on expert subjective ratings. Recent initiatives have started to explore the application of convolutional neural networks (CNN) for automated penmanship assessment. In this study, we adopted a similar approach, developing a CNN-based automatic assessment system for penmanship in traditional Chinese handwriting. Utilizing an existing database of 39,207 accurately handwritten characters (penscripts) from 40 handwriters, we had three human raters evaluate each penscript’s penmanship on a 10-point scale and calculated an average penmanship score. We trained a CNN on 90% of the penscripts and their corresponding penmanship scores. Upon testing the CNN model on the remaining 10% of penscripts, it achieved a remarkable performance (overall 9.82% normalized Mean Absolute Percentage Error) in predicting human penmanship scores, illustrating its potential for assessing handwriters’ penmanship. To enhance accessibility, we developed a mobile application based on the CNN model, allowing users to conveniently evaluate their penmanship.

Hebrew allows the representation of the meaning of a few words in one dense form by using bound morphemes that linearly attach to the word. By manipulating words’ density in text, that is, decomposing them into isolated words which changes the length of the text, it was possible to check the impact of density on reading comprehension in novice readers. Each of the 292 s graders from a low SES background, of whom 79 were struggling readers (poor decoders) and the rest were typical readers, were tested in two reading comprehension tests: dense and decomposed. They also were tested in other literacy measures (word recognition, decoding, morphological awareness, vocabulary, and spelling) to learn about their reading proficiency and awareness of morphemes. The results showed a significant interaction between text type and reading ability group, while controlling for vocabulary, indicating that text density levels had varying effects on reading performance in each reading ability group. This interaction manifested as typical readers benefiting more from decomposed texts, evidenced by improved comprehension scores for these texts compared to dense texts. In contrast, struggling readers’ comprehension scores did not significantly differ between the two text types, suggesting that text density did not influence their reading performance to the same extent. Furthermore, typical readers exhibited better performance across all literacy measures, including morphological awareness. Findings suggest that a certain level of phonological decoding and morphological awareness are needed to benefit from decomposed texts. Morphological density adds another layer of difficulty for novice readers, who need to unfold the word’s structure and reveal the full meaning – a process that is assumed to be cognitively complex. They also highlight the importance of morpheme awareness in dense, morphologically complex languages like Hebrew at an early age.

Recent studies have shown that fluent reading of word lists requires additional skills beyond efficient recognition of individual words. This study examined the specific contribution of between-word processing (sequential processing efficiency, indexed by serial digit RAN) and subskills related to text-level processing (vocabulary and syntactic skills) to a wide range of reading fluency tasks, while accounting for within-word processes (i.e., those involved in phonological recoding, orthographic decoding, and sight word reading). The sample included 139 intermediate-level (Grade 3, n = 78) and more advanced (Grade 5, n = 61) readers of Dutch. Fluency measures included simple and complex lists of words and nonwords, and a complex text. Data were analyzed through hierarchical regressions and commonality analyses. The findings confirm the importance of between-word processing for fluent reading and extend evidence from simple word lists and texts to complex word lists and texts, and simple and complex lists of nonwords. The findings hold for both intermediate-level and more advanced readers and, as expected, the contribution of between-word processing increased with reading-skill level. Effects of vocabulary were generally absent, aside from a small effect on text reading fluency in Grade 3. No effects of syntactic skills were found, even in more advanced readers. The results support the idea that once efficient individual word recognition is in place, further fluency development is driven by more efficient between-word processing. The findings also confirm that vocabulary may be less prominent in processing mechanisms underlying fluent word identification in transparent orthographies, across reading levels.

To ensure adequate writing support for children, a profound understanding of the subskills of text quality is essential. Writing theories have already helped to better understand the contribution of different subskills to text quality, but empirical work is often limited to more general low-level transcription skills like handwriting fluency and spelling. Skills that are particularly important for composing a functional text, while theoretically seen as important, are only studied in isolation. This study combines subskills at different hierarchical levels of composition. Executive functions, handwriting fluency and spelling were modeled together with text-specific skills (lexically diverse and appropriate word usage and cohesion), text length and text quality in secondary school students’ narratives. The results showed that executive functions, spelling and handwriting fluency had indirect effects on text quality, mediated by text-specific skills. Furthermore, the text-specific skills accounted for most of the explained variance in text quality over and above text length. Thus, it is clear from this study that, in addition to the frequently reported influence of transcription skills, it is text-specific skills that are most relevant for text quality.