The effect of phonics-enhanced Big Book reading on the language and literacy skills of 6-year-old pupils of different reading ability attending lower SES schools

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to improve the literacy achievement of lower socioeconomic status (SES) children by combining explicit phonics with Big Book reading. Big Book reading is a component of the text-centered (or book reading) approach used in New Zealand schools. It involves the teacher in reading an enlarged book to children and demonstrating how to use semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic cues to learn to read. There has been little research, however, to find out whether the effectiveness of Big Book reading is enhanced by adding explicit phonics. In this study, a group of 96 second graders from three lower SES primary schools in New Zealand were taught in 24 small groups of four, tracked into three different reading ability levels. All pupils were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions: a control group who received math instruction, Big Book reading enhanced with phonics (BB/EP), Big Book reading on its own, and Phonics on its own. The results showed that the BB/EP group made significantly better progress than the Big Book and Phonics groups in word reading, reading comprehension, spelling, and phonemic awareness. In reading accuracy, the BB/EP and Big Book groups scored similarly. In basic decoding skills the BB/EP and Phonics groups scored similarly. The combined instruction, compared with Big Book reading and phonics, appeared to have no comparative disadvantages and considerable advantages. The present findings could be a model for New Zealand and other countries in their efforts to increase the literacy achievement of disadvantaged pupils.

Teaching Grapheme–Phoneme Correspondences Using a Direct Mapping Approach for At-Risk Second Language Learners: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…The teaching of GPCs and shared book reading are commonly co-occurring practices in many effective reading interventions (Shapiro & Solity, 2008, 2016. Prior studies have demonstrated positive evidence of using storybooks in phonics teaching (Jenkins, Peyton, Sanders, & Vadasy, 2004;Tse & Nicholson, 2014). For example, Tse and Nicholson (2014) reported that using storybooks in phonics teaching resulted in greater gains in literacy skills of Grade 2 L1 learners of English than phonics teaching without storybook reading.…”

What Is the Influence of Morphological Knowledge in the Early Stages of Reading Acquisition Among Low SES Children? A Graphical Modeling Approach

“…The interaction between oral language and reading acquisition has recently been receiving much attention among children from low SES families (Tse and Nicholson, 2014 ). Two oral language skills have been the main focus of this research, namely, vocabulary knowledge and phoneme awareness (Hoff, 2012 ).…”

What are the criteria for a good intervention study? Response: “Unrecognized ambiguities in validity of intervention research: an example on explicit phonics and text-centered teaching”

“…Thompson ( 2015 ) has raised several validity issues about our study (Tse and Nicholson, 2014 ) while acknowledging that it would score well in terms of Troia's ( 1999 ) criteria for “What makes a good study?” A response to the critique is detailed briefly below.…”