(Answer the questions in this study guide, save the file, then copy and paste it into your blog.)
Study Guide: Spellings of words: A neglected facilitator of vocabulary learning by Ehri & Rosenthal (2007)
Name:__Allison Pendleton__________________________________________
Please consider the following questions BEFORE you read the article.
What does it mean to know a word? When you know a word, what do you know of that word?
We live in a print society, in which we are bombarded with a variety of text online or in print. Depending on complexity of the text content, we encounter words that may not be very familiar to us. Think of a time when you had a similar experience. Think of a word that you came across while you were reading a particular text online or in print.
I can’t think of one particular word that was unfamiliar but, I know I have read some scholarly journals for classes before and some of the texts seemed unfamiliar.
What strategies did you use to figure out its meaning? Did you decode the word? Did you use the surrounding context to cling a meaning to it? Or did you look it up in a dictionary?
When I find words that are unfamiliar I usually try to figure out the meaning of it by the surrounding words.
Do you think you learned the word’s meaning? Can you identify its meaning if you were presented its spelling?
When I just used context clues I may not have figured out the exact meaning but, I got a pretty good idea of what it meant. I don’t know if presented with the spelling of a word if that would help to figure out the meaning.
The article you are going to read deals with similar issues and sheds light on the connection between different representations of word knowledge.
Answer the following questions AS you read the article.
1. What was the hypothesis tested by the researchers?
Second graders: hypothesis tested was that students will learn the pronunciations and meanings of new words better when they see spellings of the words during study periods than when they do not.
Fifth graders: (1) Spellings will help fifth graders learn the pronunciations and meanings of new vocabulary words better than no spellings; (2) Students with stronger orthographic knowledge (higher level readers) will benefit more from spellings than students with weaker orthographic knowledge (lower level readers).
2. Who were the subjects?
Second and fifth graders
3. What were the experimental conditions?
Second graders and Fifth graders:
Each student was taught the pronunciation and meanings of two sets of six concrete nouns.
Spellings were shown as students learned one set
Spelling were not shown as students learned the other set.
An initial study trial occurred first.
The six words, their spellings, and their meanings were introduced. For each, a card was
displayed with a drawing of the object named by the noun and a spelling printed
beneath the picture. The experimenter pronounced the word and its definition
and the student repeated them.
The remaining trials tested students’ recall of the words’ pronunciations and meanings.
All six words were tested on each trial.
Pronunciation recall trials were interleaved with definition recall trials.
Students were given a minimum of 6 and a maximum of 9 trials to learn pronunciations
and meanings to a criterion of 3 perfect consecutive trials.
4. What did the treatment involve?
involved pronunciation and definition recalls.
Students saw the picture then tried to recall the word with correct pronunciation
the experimenter then would say the word, show the spelling, repeat the definition, and then use the word in sentence.
The second grade would then repeat the word and the sentence. For definition recall the student would see the word and picture, and then recall its meaning.
experimenter then would give the correct meaning and use it in a sentence, and then the student would say the word and give the correct meaning.
5. Which group (spelling-present vs. spelling-absent) gained more in vocabulary learning? How were the groups’ recall of pronunciations affected by the treatment?
Fifth graders learned the pronunciation and meanings of new vocabulary words better when they were shown the spellings than when they were only told the words
6. Why do you think that fifth graders who were high on a word reading task benefited more from the spelling aids than their peers with less orthographic experience and knowledge, even though the two groups did not differ on receptive vocabulary knowledge?
I think that the fifth graders who were already high on reading word tasks benefited more because they had more background knowledge to connect the spelling to. They probably had been exposed to harder words than the other students.
7. What general conclusions were derived from the study findings by the authors? What implications were offered for vocabulary learning and instruction?
“Our explanation for findings is that when students are exposed to the spellings of new vocabulary words, grapho-phonemic connections are activated” -EHRI AND ROSENTHAL
Implications:
Teachers need to become aware of importance of spelling when teaching vocabulary
Teachers need to display the spelling of words when teaching the meaning, and pronunciation of words
Have independent reading
8. What questions do you have from the article? List them here.
