Pronouncing new words aloud during the silent reading of text enhances fifth graders’ memory for vocabulary words and their spellings

Abstract

An experiment with random assignment examined the effectiveness of a strategy to learn unfamiliar English vocabulary words during text reading. Lower socioeconomic status, language minority fifth graders (M = 10 years, 7 months; n = 62) silently read eight passages each focused on an unknown multi-syllabic word that was underlined, embedded in a meaningful context, defined, depicted, and repeated three times. Students were grouped by word reading ability, matched into pairs, and randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the strategy condition, students orally pronounced the underlined words during silent reading. In the control condition, students penciled a check if they had seen the underlined words before but did not say the words aloud. Results of ANOVAs showed that the oral strategy enhanced vocabulary learning (ps \ .01), with poorer readers showing bigger effect sizes than better readers in remembering pronunciation-meaning associations and spellings of the words. In a second experiment, 32 fifth graders from the same school described the strategies they use when encountering unfamiliar words in context. Better readers reported more word-level strategies whereas poorer readers reported more text-based strategies. Our explanation is that application of the word-level strategy of decoding new words aloud strengthened connections between spellings, pronunciations, and meanings in memory compared to silent reading of new words, particularly among poor readers who were less skilled and less likely to use this strategy unless instructed to do so.

The Effect of Study Island Software on Grades 9-11 State Scores in Literacy

“…Literacy teachers should use Study Island software in their classrooms to help students increase their proficiency in reading comprehension (Duke, 2010;Gallagher, 2009;Gewertz, 2010;National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2011;O'Connor, 2009). Study Island software can help students in understanding what they have read (Abdullah et al, 2012) via visual representations (Anderson, 2008Rosenthal & Ehri, 2011) and feedback (Pang, 2013) when students tailor reading content (Macaruso & Rodman, 2009;Meyer et al, 2011).…”

“…Reading comprehension programs include reading comprehension strategies (Dewitz, Jones, & Leahy, 2009). Software reading programs can be used as reading comprehension intervention tools for students to improve reading proficiency (Attaprechakul, 2013;Baleghizadeh & Babanour, 2011;Fatemi et al, 2014;Kuhi & Yavari, 2013;Rosenthal & Ehri, 2011;Zarei et al, 2012). Reading software programs are designed to interact with students (Akinbobola & Afolabi, 2009) by retelling a story to increase reading comprehension (Hedin & Conderman, 2010;McNeil, 2011;Norman, 2012;Pang, 2013) via dialogue with peers and teachers (Maine, 2013) where teachers encourage students to read (Meyer et al, 2011;Murphy & Fink, 2012) and monitor students' progress (Chen, Chen, & Sun, 2010).…”

The Relationship between White Matter and Reading Acquisition, Refinement and Maintenance

“…This was further supported by the negative correlation observed between RD and reading scores. Since the beginning stages of the reading acquisition involves teaching children the overt articulation of the letters and bigrams, tracts (like pSLF) that are connecting regions associated with letter-sound mapping (supramarginal gyrus) to articulatory (frontal, premotor) processing are of utmost importance in helping develop the articulatory motor representations for words [47,48]. In addition to left tracts, we provided evidence for a contribution of the right dorsal tracts (pSLF and SLF) to reading performance during the reading acquisition period.…”

Lire pour écrire. L’écriture miroir de la lecture

“…Or, le processus d'acquisition du vocabulaire est directement lié à la construction en mémoire sémantique des représentations des signifiés auxquelles sont associés des signifiants (Denhière et Jhean-Larose, 2011). La permanence de ces repré-sentations dépend des phénomènes mnésiques, dont la propension à l'oubli et, par conséquent, à la nécessité de réactivation qui s'opère, notamment par la verbalisation (Rosenthal et Ehri, 2011) et la structuration du vocabulaire (Verhoeven, 2011). Les activités de catégorisation et de hiérarchisation, en évitant de surcharger la mémoire de travail, favorisent l'encodage et la compréhension.…”