Orthographic Analogy Training with Kindergarten Children: Effects on Analogy Use, Phonemic Segmentation, and Letter-Sound Knowledge

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of teaching children orthographic analogies based on onset and rime units (words that rhyme). Forty-eight kindergarten children were selected for the study and classified as high, middle, or low segmenters based on their performance on the Test of Awareness of Language Segments (TALS) (Sawyer, 1987). Pretraining and posttraining measures consisted of segmentation ability, letter-sound knowledge, and reading words by analogy. Although the experimental group showed significant gains on each measure over no-training controls, analogy training affected children differently depending upon their prior segmentation level. Low segmenters gained most in segmentation ability with small, but significant, effects in letter-sound knowledge. Middle and high segmenters showed greatest improvement in their ability to perform the word reading by analogy task and in their letter-sound knowledge. This study provides support for a role for onset and rime units in beginning reading and may indicate how rhymes contribute to children's awareness of phonemes.

First Graders' Use of Analogy in Word Reading

“…Previous studies have established that phonological awareness plays an important role in decoding words by using of analogy (Goswami, 1986(Goswami, ,1990Goswami & Mead, 1992;Haskell et al, 1992;Muter et al, 1994;Peterson & Haines, 1992). Researchers (e.g., Goswami, 1990;Goswami & Mead, 1992) found that there is a special link between rhyming skills and use of analogy.…”

“…tm'A WANG & GAFFNEY S EVERAL RESEARCHERS RECOMMEND the use of analogy to assist children in decoding unfamiliar words (Bruck & Treiman, 1992;Cunningham, 1991;Gaskins, Gaskins, Anderson, & Schommer, 1995;Gaskins, Gaskins, & Gaskins, 1991;Haskell, Foorman, & Swank, 1992;Lovett et al, 1994;Peterson & Haines, 1992;White & Cunningham, 1990). In this approach, children are taught to use the words they know as clues to help them read unknown words.…”

Teaching Decoding Skills to Poor Readers in High School

“…The children learned fastest with the onset-rime segmentation training, and least quickly with the whole-word method. Peterson and Haines (1992) found that regardless of initial phonological ability, kindergarten children trained in the rime analogies (rhyming words with the same spelling patterns, sometimes called phonograms) made greater gains in analogical word reading than did the untrained children. Ehri and Robbins (1992) found that the ability to read by rime analogy may require a certain minimal level of decoding knowledge or a certain sight vocabulary.…”

“…Work by Moustafa (1995), Goswami (1986Goswami ( , 1988, and Peterson and Haines (1992) shows that children perform better when analogies are based on rimes rather than on other parts of the word such as the onset plus vowel. Beginning readers or poor readers can be trained to use rime analogies to identify words, and subsequent word identification is improved by this training.…”

“…In Peterson and Haines' (1992) study children were given a clue word, told what it was, and then asked to read a target word which shared either the initial consonant and vowel, the rime, or two letters with the clue word. Replicating earlier work by Goswami (1986Goswami ( , 1988, they found that children performed best when the target word shared the rime with the clue word.…”