Focusing Attention on Decoding for Children With Poor Reading Skills: Design and Preliminary Tests of the Word Building Intervention

Abstract

This study examined the reading skills of children who have deficient decoding skills in the years following the first grade and traced their progress across 20 sessions of a decoding skills intervention called Word Building. Initially, the children demonstrated deficits in decoding, reading comprehension, and phonemic awareness skills. Further examination of decoding attempts revealed a pattern of accurate decoding of the first grapheme in a word, followed by relatively worse performance on subsequent vowels and consonants, suggesting that these children were not engaging in full alphabetic decoding. The intervention directed attention to each grapheme position within a word through a procedure of progressive minimal pairing of words that differed by one grapheme. Relative to children randomly assigned to a control group, children assigned to the intervention condition demonstrated significantly greater improvements in decoding attempts at all grapheme positions and also demonstrated significantly greater improvements in standardized measures of decoding, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness. Results are discussed in terms of the consequences of not fully engaging in alphabetic decoding during early reading experience, and the self-teaching role of alphabetic decoding for improving word identification, reading comprehension, and phonological awareness skills.

Development of structure and function in the infant brain: Implications for cognition, language and social behaviour

“…The acquisition of object permanence is an important milestone in cognitive development and is also a precursor to later executive functioning skills (Diamond, 2002). Working memory and the ability to control attention and inhibit automatic responses are important for many more complex tasks later in development (McCandliss et al, 2003). Face processing is a fundamental skill for human interaction, and faces are important even to newborn infants (Johnson et al, 1991a,b).…”

A Case Study Empirical Comparison of Three Methods to Evaluate Tutorial Behaviors

“…The analysis problem in our case study is to compare two modes of practice for children who are still learning the letter-sound mappings of English. The Reading Tutor uses an instructional activity adapted from published interventions [2][3][4][5] to teach these mappings in the context of isolated words. To exercise taught mappings in the context of connected reading, the Reading Tutor then presents practice text in one of two modes -choosing randomly between them each time, but using the same text either way.…”

Relaciones entre decodificación, conocimiento léxico-semántico e inferencias en niños de escolaridad primaria

“…La compren sión de un texto implica la construcción de una representación mental integrada y coherente de la información que el texto vehiculiza (Abusamra, Ferreres & Raiter, 2010;Belinchón, Igoa & Riviére, 1992;Gernsbacher, Varner & Faust, 1990;Gutierrez, Elosúa, García Madruga, Gárate & Luque, 1999;Kintsch, 1998;León, 2004;Molinari, 2008;Nation, 2005). Diversos autores han enfatizado la relevancia de las habilidades implicadas en el desarrollo de la comprensión lectora (Marder, 2011;McCandliss, Beck, Sandak & Perfetti, 2003;Nation, 2005;Perfetti, 2010a;Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975). A la hora de explicitar los factores que intervienen en la comprensión lectora, proponen una serie de ap titudes interrelacionadas que intervienen sobre la información que provee el texto y la que aporta el lector, viabilizando la construcción del sentido de un texto (Nation, 2005;Perfetti, 2010a;Perfetti, Landi & Oakhill, 2005).…”

“…La decodificación consiste en la habilidad del lector para realizar la correspondencia de los grafemas con los fonemas, es decir, establecer las regularidades en la relación entre las palabras del lenguaje oral y su representación gráfica alfabética (McCandliss et al, 2003;Nation, 2005;Parodi, Peronard & Ibañez, 2010;Perfetti, 2010b;Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975;Perfetti, Van Dyke & Hart, 2001;Shankweiler et al, 1999). Investigaciones del ámbito angloparlante dieron a conocer la importancia de la automatización del proceso de decodificación en la comprensión textual en el caso de niños de escolaridad básica (McCandliss et al, 2003;Perfetti & Hogaboam, 1975) e indicaron que cuando la decodificación es lenta, ineficiente e implica un gran esfuerzo, el lector dirige sus recursos cognitivos a la identificación de letras y a la relación con el sonido correspondiente, dejando de lado la construcción del significado de lo que lee Mc Candliss et al, 2003;Nation, 2005;Perfetti & Roth, 1980;Shankweiler et al, 1999).…”