The Dramatic Impact of Explicit Instruction on Learning to Read in a New Writing System

Abstract

There is profound and long-standing debate over the role of explicit instruction in reading acquisition. In this research, we investigated the impact of teaching regularities in the writing system explicitly rather than relying on learners to discover these regularities through text experience alone. Over 10 days, 48 adults learned to read novel words printed in two artificial writing systems. One group learned spelling-to-sound and spelling-to-meaning regularities solely through experience with the novel words, whereas the other group received a brief session of explicit instruction on these regularities before training commenced. Results showed that virtually all participants who received instruction performed at ceiling on tests that probed generalization of underlying regularities. In contrast, despite up to 18 hr of training on the novel words, less than 25% of discovery learners performed on par with those who received instruction. These findings illustrate the dramatic impact of teaching method on outcomes during reading acquisition.

App-based morphological training produces lasting effects on word knowledge in primary school children: A randomized controlled trial.

“…Critically, explicit and implicit learning processes reinforce each other. Explicit instruction can help learners create a scaffold to organize the language input they receive (Rastle et al, 2021). Implicit learning during practice can contribute to automatization of skills so that learners can employ them in rapid online language processing and reading tasks (Tamminen et al, 2015).…”

Tenacious instructions: How to dismantle newly instructed task rules?

“…For most species, discovering how to act best in an unfamiliar context is a laborious process that involves costly trial-and-error learning of the appropriate set of stimulus-response rules. Fortunately, OWING to extraordinary language abilities, humans can boost learning and performance through explicit instruction (e.g., Rastle et al, 2021) and circumvent the trial-and-error process. For example, a driving instructor can instruct the student driver how to maneuver the car, preparing the student’s mind for the most appropriate procedures to be executed in traffic.…”

Implications of Computational Thinking Knowledge Transfer for Developing Educational Interventions

“…Since most teachers prepare their classes with an eye toward a list of content objectives, Zohar and Barzilai (2015) suggest including an additional list of CT objectives as well. The evidence suggests that KT is more effective in an instruction in which the teacher guides the student (direct instruction), compared to an instruction in which the student discovers by himself what he has to learn (discovery learning) (Rastle et al, 2021). In general, it has been proven that some guidance from the teacher can dramatically improve the result of the KT.…”