Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures
LITERACY STUDIES
VOLUME 2
Series Editor: R. Malatesha Joshi, Texas A&M University,USA Editorial Board: Linnea Ehri, CUNY Graduate School, USA George Hynd, Purdue University, USA Richard Olson, University of Colorado, USA Pieter Reitsma, Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St. Louis, USA Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge, UK Jane Oakhill, University of Sussex, Brighton, JK Philip Seymour, University of Dundee, UK Guinevere Eden, Georgetown University Medical Center, USA Catherine McBride Chang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China While language defines humanity, literacy defines civilization. Understandably, illiteracy or difficulties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern of our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy problems would put the figure at more than a billion people in the world. Because of the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown is pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become difficult to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the artificial barriers that exist among different professional specialties. The purpose of the proposed series is to bring together the available research studies into a coherent body of knowledge. Publications in this series are intended for use by educators, clinicians and research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties. Some of the titles suitable for the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and reading skills, orthography and literacy; and research based techniques for improving decoding, vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension skills. A complete list of titles published in this series can be viewed by going to the following URL: http://www.springer.com/series/7206
Dorit Aram Ofra Korat ●
Editors
Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures
Editors
Dorit Aram Constantiner School of Education Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv Israel
[email protected] Ofra Korat School of Education Bar-Ilan University Ramat Gan Israel
[email protected] ISBN 978-1-4419-0833-9 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-0834-6 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0834-6 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2009940320 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Dedication
This book is dedicated to Professor Iris Levin on her retirement. An internationally known and influential researcher, Professor Levin is a developmental psychologist at the School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Israel. She has studied early literacy for over 25 years and has published many studies in leading journals. She is one of the leaders in early literacy policy in Israel. Before beginning her work on literacy, Dr. Levin’s work focused on children’s growing physical concepts, particularly the concepts of time and speed, within NeoPiagetian and Information Processing frameworks. In this domain, she published leading articles and edited a book with contributions by prominent researchers in cognitive development, collaborating with Robert Siegler and Friedrich Wilkening. Later, she turned to the development of early literacy and sociocultural factors that shape and enhance children’s progress in this domain. Dr. Levin focused on emergent writing and how writing initially grows from drawing. Her collaboration with Adriana Bus enriched this work. Levin also demonstrated the major role of letter knowledge in bridging oral and written words, and how it fuels early writing and initial steps of reading. This work grew in collaboration with Linnea Ehri. The study of early writing expanded to include analysis of parental mediation of writing to kindergartners and young elementary schoolchildren, and of ways to improve parental mediation. She demonstrated the significance of parents’ mediation of writing in promoting their children’s literacy, and prescribed ways to improve this mediation. Storybook reading, another common parent–child joint activity believed to be central in promoting language and literacy, was compared to joint writing, showing differential effects on children’s development. This work grew in collaboration with Dorit Aram and Ofra Korat in Israel, and with Catherine McBride Chang in China and Liliana Tolchinsky in Spain, adding a cross-cultural aspect to this line of research. As an active participant in the Price Brody Initiative in Jaffa (a poor Jewish– Arab city), she initiated, developed, and implemented literacy enhancement projects. Within this initiative, she led a line of pioneering literacy interventions within the Jewish and the Arab communities. This work grew in collaboration with Dorit Aram, Elinor Saiegh Haddad, and Margalit Ziv. Iris Levin served on several national committees dealing with early education at large and with teaching of reading in Israel. She chaired the Levin Committee, v
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which developed a program for 3- to 6-year-olds in literacy and language. The Israeli Ministry of Education endorsed this program in 2007 as a national obligatory curriculum for preschoolers and kindergartners. In addition to her academic endeavors, Iris Levin has volunteered to assist the Clinical Unit of the School of Law at Tel Aviv University on issues of human rights related to education. Her work has focused on equal opportunity for education for the impoverished Bedouin population and on the humane portrayal of the gay– lesbian community in educational television targeting youth. Her partner in this work was the social activist and lawyer, Dori Spivak. Not only an outstanding scientist who has maintained the highest standards for research, Iris Levin is also an excellent and dedicated teacher who has nurtured many students, teachers, and researchers. She is a model to many as a researcher and as a human being. As her former students and her current colleagues, we are honored to edit this book and to dedicate it to her.
About the Editors
Dr. Dorit Aram is an Associate Professor and head of the Special Education Program in Tel Aviv University’s School of Education, Israel. Her research focuses on parent–child literacy interactions and their implications for early literacy and socioemotional development, in Hebrew and Arab communities. Addressing needs in special populations, her work examines these interactions in parent–child dyads of children with hearing loss, ADHD, and low socioeconomic background, and among precocious readers. Dr. Aram has conducted early interventions aimed at improving kindergarten and preschool teachers’ as well as parents’ mediation and children’s early literacy. Dr. Aram has been a board member of the Israel Literacy and Language Society from its inception and is now its president (in collaboration with Dr. Ofra Korat). Dr. Ofra Korat is an Associate Professor and the head of Early Childhood Program in the School of Education at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. Her research focuses on early literacy experience in school and family, with special attention to the role of parental beliefs on literacy development and education and parent–child interactions in facilitating literacy development. She implements this line of studies among diverse cultures in Israel, including Ethiopian and Arab families. She conducts intervention studies to facilitate literacy development among children at risk in language and literacy development. Her recent scholarly interests focus on the relationship between technology and literacy. Dr. Korat has been a board member of the Israel Literacy and Language Society from its inception and is now its president (in collaboration with Dr. Dorit Aram).
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Preface
It has become increasingly clear that a country’s prosperity and cultural progress largely depend on its level of literacy. Consequently, literacy enhancement has become a public issue that interests readers across the world. Integrating innovative insights from different perspectives, this book promotes cross-fertilization of ideas and practices and explores how we might provide children with stable literacy foundations. For many years, the study of literacy development and enhancement was generally based on English language learners. This picture has changed dramatically in the last two decades, and today we benefit from the intensive work of researchers from different countries and languages. Worldwide research increasingly highlights the role of early literacy in young children’s development and the increasing value of literacy in general development. Moreover, massive immigration around the world has increased the significance of studying bilingual literacy, acquisition of a second language, and foreign language learning. Researchers from different countries and cultures have studied the relationships between their languages’ orthographies and the acquisition of literacy. In the 16 chapters included in this book, we bring together studies and thoughts of researchers from eight countries across the world, focusing on literacy acquisition and advancement in Cantonese, Catalan, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Kannada, Mandarin, Portuguese, and Spanish. The studies presented in this book employ a variety of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Some of these are naturalistic, while others are experimental. All of them aim to present a reliable picture of the state of the art in the arena of literacy development and enhancement. The chapters in this book are grouped into four parts: (1) Literacy Development, (2) Promotion of Literacy at Home and in School, (3) Bilingualism – Acquiring a Second Spoken and Written Language, and (4) Beyond Literacy. Part 1 consists of five chapters focusing on Literacy Development. It includes analyses of acquisition of phonological awareness, print awareness, letter knowledge, spelling, and writing. The studies in this section refer to the significance of these skills in different orthographies. In Chap. 1, Anna Both-de Vries and Adriana Bus explore the role of name writing in children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge. The chapter presents a series of studies on early spelling in Dutch. The researchers assert that the first letter in their own name is the first letter that children ix
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write phonetically. They conclude that name writing functions as the stepping-stone to the alphabetic strategy. Chapter 2 by Sarah Robins and Rebecca Trieman also refers to the significance of children’s own names in informal early literacy experiences among English-speaking children. They investigate the informal learning of surface features of writing (what letters and words look like) and deeper features of written language (the fact that print symbolizes spoken language). They conclude that informal learning about the surface and deep features of writing begins at an early age, and it can help prepare children for the formal reading and writing instruction at school. Chapter 3 by Cláudia Cardoso-Martins and Marcela Fulanete Corrêa centers on the development of spelling skills among Brazilian Portuguesespeaking children. It explores the similarities in which English-, Hebrew-, and Portuguese-speaking children take advantage of their letter name knowledge to connect print to speech. The researchers conclude that Portuguese-speaking children rely on their letter names knowledge to spell words, and in this they resemble Hebrew- and English-speaking children. Chapter 4 by Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin focuses on the development of print awareness. Using eye tracking methods, the researchers examine where children are looking during shared reading. The results indicate that, during shared book reading, children engage in minimal exploration of the print, and that their parents rarely draw their attention to it. The researchers suggest that print awareness may be developed by activities in which adults teach children to print letters and words and to learn letters and sounds as they take part in shared book reading. Although Hebrew letter names have been claimed to be less useful in supporting children’s literacy acquisition, in Chap. 5, Iris Levin presents two studies that assessed the impact of the nature of Hebrew letter names on children’s letter naming, letter writing, and first letter isolation. Hebrew letter names (e.g., gimel for /g/) are longer than English letter names (di for /d/), and, unlike English, they incorporate sounds that are not relevant to the focal letter sound. Despite this, Levin found that they are highly effective cues in helping children to report, spell, and sound out letters within a word. The author concludes that letter names in Hebrew are more effective than in English. The fact that Hebrew letter names are relatively long does not limit their usefulness in promoting children’s early literacy acquisition. Levin suggests that these results can be explained by the cacophonic nature of Hebrew letter names and the greater length of full name cues in Hebrew. Part 2, Promotion of Literacy at Home and in School, examines the sociocultural context of literacy acquisition. This section includes studies of storybook reading, parental beliefs about literacy practices, the influence of schooling practices, and the efficiency of literacy interventions. First, in Chap. 6, Susan Sonnenschein, Linda Baker, and Robert Serpell describe a 5-year longitudinal investigation of children’s literacy development in a sociocultural context. They provide the readers with an overview of cultural and environmental factors that are central to children’s literacy development at home. This chapter studies parental beliefs, focusing on low- and middle-income families. The authors conclude that parental beliefs and children’s home experiences make a significant difference in children’s literacy development. Although low- and middle-income children had different home
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literacy experiences, the intimate culture of the home was a more powerful predictor of literacy development than demographic factors such as family income and ethnicity. In Chap. 7, Catherine McBride-Chang, Yvonne Chow, and Xiuli Tong focus within the home environment context on parent–child reading and writing activities. While Chap. 6 studies variations of home contexts in different socioeconomic status (SES) groups within one language, Chap. 7 provides data regarding home literacy practice in different orthographies and cultures. The authors define two major facets affecting children’s literacy development. One is implicit and includes variables such as parents’ educational levels or beliefs regarding literacy. The other is explicit and comprises parents’ scaffolding of children’s writing and shared book reading. The authors conclude that there are distinctive features in parent–child reading and writing activities that have a clear impact on children’s language and literacy across cultures. Within the arena of literacy activities in Chap. 8, Monique Sénéchal centers on storybook reading. She asks what reading books to young children does and does not do in children’s language and literacy development. The chapter presents an overview of six studies. These studies show that the number of times, as well as the manner in which the adult reads to children, affects children’s acquisition of comprehension and spoken vocabulary. The studies also provide evidence that children’s vocabulary is a strong predictor of reading comprehension. To enhance language and literacy of preschoolers, Chap. 9 calls upon us to build a bridge between home and school. Linda Phillips presents a critical view about the ways in which researchers and educators sometimes perceive low SES parents’ attitudes regarding literacy education. In her chapter, she describes a line of studies demonstrating the disconnection between teachers and parents. These studies show that parents from low SES do care deeply about their children’s literacy development, and that educators occasionally overlook these parents’ beliefs. She declares that it is critical to forge informed collaboration between homes and schools for the advancement of children from low SES background. The author presents a 5-year longitudinal study of a project in the community. This project demonstrates effective ways of bridging between parents and teachers to the benefit of children. The last two chapters in this part relate to schoolchildren. Linnea Ehri and Julie Rosenthal in Chap. 10 provide an overview of studies of vocabulary acquisition, which plays a central role in reading ability and academic achievements. Vocabulary is traditionally studied in the context of oral language. Ehri and Rosenthal describe studies that have assessed the contribution that spelling makes to vocabulary learning in English. They conclude that the field of vocabulary learning and instruction has neglected an important skill that facilitates vocabulary growth – spelling. Concluding this part in Chap. 11, Frederick Morrison, Carol MacDonald Connor, and Annemarie Hindman present an innovative approach toward effective reading instruction. This approach acknowledges the early individual differences among children in cognitive, language, literacy, and social skills and prescribes effective instruction that takes into account each child’s characteristics. In accordance with their theories, the researchers developed an intervention program that assessed the children’s literacy. Based on the child’s scores, a computer program specified the amounts and types of instruction
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(i.e., teacher/child management and code/meaning focus) that a child should receive in order to reach his/her optimal level. The researchers report that children in the intervention group showed greater growth in reading skills than did children in the control group. In addition, the closer the instruction received by the child matched the duration and type of activity that the software recommended, the more children’s reading skill grew over the year. The four chapters of Part 3, Bilingualism – Acquiring a Second Spoken and Written Language, illuminate how different languages and orthographic systems affect children’s literacy acquisition. Literacy acquisition in different languages puts distinct cognitive and metalinguistic demands on readers. These differences may be related to the specific typology of the orthography and to specific language features. On the other hand, common cognitive processes might underlie the reading process across languages. Chapter 12 by Malatesha Joshi presents an integration of two studies, exploring both commonalities and differences of literacy acquisition in different languages. In the first study, reading comprehension of monolinguals is shown, in English and Spanish alike, to be strongly explained by decoding and listening comprehension. But decoding contributed more to reading comprehension in English, the language with more opaque orthography. In the second study, an analysis was carried out on reading and spelling of three bilingual children: one with dyslexia, another with hyperlexia, and the third a normal reader. These children spoke English and Kannada. Similar differences in decoding and comprehension emerged between the dyslexic and the hyperlexic children across the two languages, again showing commonalities between languages. Similarities and differences in second language acquisition were also studied by Liliana Tolchinsky. In Chap. 13 she describes a study that examined the effects of first language (L1) on the acquisition of the second language (L2). She compared morphological transformations in Catalan by children recruited from Moroccan and Chinese origins living in Spain. These two groups are particularly revealing because of the richer morphology in L1 of children originating from Morocco rather than China. Whereas the two groups exhibited similar levels of successful performance, they differed in the kind of mistakes they produced, reflecting the features of their L1. In the same vein, referring to similarities and differences of literacy acquisitions in different languages, Esther Geva and Dana Shafman in Chap. 14 examine the development in morphology, oral comprehension, and vocabulary in Hebrew of English-speaking children. These first- and second-grade children studied Hebrew as a foreign language (HFL) for about two and a half hours a day, 5 days a week. The researchers found that grade 2 children had somewhat better vocabulary, morphological, and syntactic skills than their counterparts in grade 1. The researchers claim that vocabulary is significant for the emergence of basic morphological knowledge in HFL children. A follow-up study is presented in Chap. 15 by Orly Lipka and Linda Siegel. The authors show how a balanced literacy program, consisting of early literacy skills and language support, can close gaps in literacy knowledge between children of L1 and English as a second language (ESL) background. The children, who received a balanced literacy program in kindergarten, were followed from kindergarten to fifth grade. Whereas in kindergarten, L1 speakers
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outperformed their ESL counterparts on a wide range of measures (phonological processing, syntactic awareness, memory for sentence, and spelling), by grade 5, the same groups of children exhibited a similar level of literacy almost across the board. Part 4, Teaching and Learning, presents Chap. 16 by David Olson, who approaches the important issue of teaching. This chapter provides an overarching critical review of theories of teaching pedagogical theories. The author presents his own perspective on pedagogy, based on intentionality, responsibility, accountability, and the earning of entitlement. In Olson’s words: “What one knows, understands, and infers is subordinated to one’s ability to take on and successfully meet one’s obligations.” He calls for developing a new science of pedagogy. While this chapter has a broader perspective than usually met in literature on literacy, the examples utilized refer to teaching of literacy. We would like to thank the authors of the chapters in this book for their dedication and scholarship and for their enthusiasm in contributing to a book dedicated to Professor Iris Levin. The research literature on the development and enhancement of literacy across orthographies and cultures is expanding. We hope that the ideas set forth in this book will stimulate researchers around the world to broaden this line of studies and include more languages and orthographies in different countries.
Dorit Aram Ofra Korat
Contents
Part 1 Literacy Development 1 It’s All in the Name.................................................................................... Anna C. Both-de Vries and Adriana G. Bus
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2 Learning About Writing Begins Informally............................................ Sarah Robins and Rebecca Treiman
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3 The Role of Letter Name Knowledge in Early Spelling Development: Evidence from Brazilian Portuguese............................... Cláudia Cardoso-Martins and Marcela Fulanete Corrêa
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4 An Eye for Print: Child and Adult Attention to Print During Shared Book Reading................................................................................ Mary Ann Evans and Jean Saint-Aubin
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5 The Role of Hebrew Letter Names in Early Literacy: The Case of Multi-phonemic Acrophonic Names................................... Iris Levin
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Part 2 Promoting Literacy at Home and in School 6 The Early Childhood Project: A 5-Year Longitudinal Investigation of Children’s Literacy Development in Sociocultural Context............................................................................ Susan Sonnenschein, Linda Baker, and Robert Serpell 7 Early Literacy at Home: General Environmental Factors and Specific Parent Input.......................................................................... Catherine McBride-Chang, Yvonne Y. Y. Chow, and Xiuli Tong
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8 Reading Books to Young Children: What It Does and Does Not Do....................................................................................... 111 Monique Sénéchal 9 The Making of Literate Families: Considerations of Context and Misconceptions............................................................... 123 Linda M. Phillips 10 Spellings of Words: A Neglected Facilitator of Vocabulary Learning........................................................................... 137 Linnea C. Ehri and Julie Rosenthal 11 Early Schooling and Growth of Literacy in the Transition to School.................................................................................................... 153 Frederick J. Morrison, Carol MacDonald Connor, and Annemarie Hindman Part 3 Bilingualism – Acquiring a Second Spoken and Written Language 12 Role of Orthography in Literacy Acquisition and Literacy Problems Among Monolinguals and Bilinguals............. 167 R. Malatesha Joshi 13 Becoming Literate in a Foreign Language............................................ 177 Liliana Tolchinsky 14 Rudiments of Inflectional Morphology Skills in Emergent English–Hebrew Biliterates.............................................. 191 Esther Geva and Dana Shafman 15 Early Identification and Intervention to Prevent Reading Difficulties................................................................................................. 205 Orly Lipka and Linda S. Siegel Part 4 Teaching and Learning 16 Whatever Happened to Pedagogical Theory?....................................... 223 David R. Olson Index.................................................................................................................. 235
Contributors
Linda Baker University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA Anna C. Both-de Vries Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Adriana G. Bus Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands Cláudia Cardoso-Martins Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil Yvonne Y.Y. Chow The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Marcela F. Corrêa Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil Linnea C. Ehri City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, NY, USA Mary A. Evans University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada Esther Geva University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Annemarie Hindman University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Malatesha R. Joshi College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Iris Levin Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
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Orly Lipka University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Carol MacDonald-Connor University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA Catherine McBride-Chang The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Frederick J. Morrison University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA David R. Olson University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Linda M. Phillips University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada Sarah Robins Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA Julie Rosenthal William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA Jean Saint-Aubin Université de Moncton, Moncton, NB, Canada Monique Sénéchal Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada Rebecca Treiman Washington University, St. Louis, MO, USA Robert Serpell University of Zambia, Lusaka, Zambia Dana Shafman University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada Linda S. Siegel University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Susan Sonnenschein University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA Liliana Tolchinsky University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain Xiuli Tong The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Contributors
Part 1 Literacy Development
Chapter 1
It’s All in the Name Anna C. Both-de Vries and Adriana G. Bus
Abstract From Levin’s seminal research, it appears that name writing, a natural focus of most young children, is the first stable written form with meaning. Inspired by Levin’s finding, we began to investigate the role of name writing in children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge. We present here a series of three Dutch studies from which it appears that children’s understanding of writing as a symbolic device starts with the first letter of the proper name. Taking into account the finding that name writing in the preschool stage is one of the best predictors of conventional literacy in school age (Strickland & Shanahan, 2004), children’s own name, often the first word that they learn to read and write, may play a special role when they develop an understanding of the symbolic function of writing. Badian (1982), for instance, found name writing to be one of the top three predictors of both first- and second-grade reading achievement, using the Stanford Achievement Test Total Reading Score as the outcome measure. Furthermore, there is evidence for the assumption that name identification is strongly related to phonological skills and letter-sound knowledge, whereas recognition of environmental print (e.g., Exit, McDonalds or Coca Cola) is unrelated to phonological awareness or letter-sound knowledge (Blair & Savage, 2006). Learning to understand language, infants demonstrate significant preference for their own name when compared with foils (Mandel, Jusczyk, & Pisoni, 1995). Likewise, children’s writing of their own name is identifiable as writing prior to other words (Levin, Both-de Vries, Aram, & Bus, 2005). Besides, their proper name is among the first words that children can write conventionally (Levin et al., 2005).When children have learnt to spell their proper name, they follow it up by other names as Sarah’s case demonstrates: Once she was able to write her own name, she immediately began working intently on learning to write Matthew, Mommy, and Daddy (Martens, 1999). As the name is the first stable written form with meaning, it is assumed to represent a singularly important benchmark in early literacy development
A.G. Bus () Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands e-mail:
[email protected] D. Aram and O. Korat (eds.), Literacy Development and Enhancement Across Orthographies and Cultures, Literacy Studies 101, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0834-6_1, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
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A.C. Both-de Vries and A.G. Bus
(Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982; Welsch, Sullivan, & Justice, 2003). In line with this finding, we have begun to study how the proper name influences the spelling of other words, and the skills that are basic to spelling simple words.
Study I: Random Versus Ambiguous Use of Letters from the Name to Symbolize Meaning Following Ehri’s developmental portrayal, children’s emerging spelling skills can be described in terms of an increasing ability to parse spoken words and decide what units align with the written form (Ehri & Wilce, 1985). The name may be the start of this development. Exposure to their written name affords children many early learning opportunities by which graphemes and sounds become connected (Treiman & Broderick, 1998; Villaume & Wilson, 1989). More than other words, the name may elicit responses from parents and teachers like: “That’s /pi/ of Peter.” Children are thus faced with an important feature of written language, namely that a familiar letter form refers to a sound in a spoken word (Byrne, 1998; Molfese, Beswick, Monlar, & Jacobi-Vessels, 2006).We hypothesize therefore that children’s understanding of writing as a symbolic device starts with letters from their names. Following this line of argument, we may expect that phonetic writing starts with the letters of a child’s own name, whatever those letters are. However, so far the literature does not provide unanimous support for this hypothesis. Treiman and Broderick (1998) found that English-speaking children do not necessarily know the letter sound for the first letter of their own name, even when they show a relatively good knowledge of the conventional label of this letter. That is, a child named Victor is likely to be better than a child named Susan at naming the letter V correctly, but not at saying the corresponding sound /v/. If we assume that knowledge of the letter-sound relationship is essential, this hypothesis predicts that Victor wouldn’t spell V better than other letters when making attempts to write words. On the other hand, there is evidence that young speakers of Hebrew show elevated levels of letter-sound knowledge for the first letter of their own name (Levin & Aram, 2004). This finding would predict that a child’s spelling might be stronger for that letter in particular. Studying kindergarten children and first and second graders, Treiman and colleagues (Treiman, Kessler, & Bourassa, 2001) found that early phonetic spellings are not limited to letters from the name. In spite of Treiman’s results, we hypothesize that letters of the child’s name are incentives for phonetic sensitivity. Assuming that sounding out is first practiced with letters of the name (grown-ups may often say: “That’s /pi/ of Peter”, but not too often: “That’s /bi/ of bear” or something similar), we expect that for a short period, phonetic writing is restricted to the letters of a child’s name. In Treiman et al.’s sample (2001), the effect of name letters may not have been identified because a group of children who had just started to write phonetically was mixed with a some what more advanced group, thus distorting effects of the name at the very beginning.
1 It’s All in the Name
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Several studies have reported that young children select letters from their own name when they compose texts or write down words that are dictated (Aram & Levin, 2001; Bloodgood, 1999; Treiman et al., 2001). Bloodgood (1999), for instance, concluded after a close examination of the letters used by 30 four- and five-year-old children in writing samples collected over a year’s time that 41% of the letters were letters from their own name. Children may prefer these letters to other letters from the alphabet because they know how to print letters from the name and probably also because they are aware that these letters symbolize meaning (Sulzby, Barnhart, & Hieshima, 1989). Most children have experienced that grownups are able to recognize their name writing. Another possibility is that the sounds of name letters are recognized in spoken words prior to other letter sounds because children often practice sounding out name letters when grown-ups sound out letters of the name. Adults may often say: “That’s your letter, /di/ of Daisy.” However, as letters from the name are known to be utilized randomly when writing unpracticed words, it is hard to decide when these letters are used phonetically. Letters of the name may indeed match sounds of dictated words, but they may be selected purely by accident. Treiman and colleagues (2001) characterized those letters therefore as being used ambiguously, leaving open the possibility that letters from the child’s name were selected by chance even where sounds did match. To test phonetic use of any letter it is essential to contrast words including the letter and words not including the letter. When children use a letter equally often in both selections, it is plausible that the letter is selected by chance. If however a letter is more often used ambiguously than randomly we may assume that children use this letter not purely by chance but that they can identify the letter sound in the spoken word. We designed a study (Both-de Vries & Bus, 2009a) to test whether inventing alphabetic–phonetic spelling begins with letters from the name by showing for the earliest stage of alphabetic–phonetic writing that children are best at representing letters from the proper name. This study included 35 children in the age range of 3½ to 5 using conventional letters in more than half of 16 dictated words, but the products rarely were conventional or readable invented spellings. Besides their proper name, we dictated 16 randomly chosen words like DROPJES [liquorices], SNEEUW [snow], WIEL [wheel], DOOS [box], BOOM [tree], and DRIE BOMEN [three trees]. First we coded per child which conventional letters occurred in one or more dictated words, then for each letter we coded whether the letter was the first letter from the name, another letter from the name or a letter not included in the name (referred to here as non-name letter). In addition, for each of the letters we coded per word whether the word included the letter, and whether the letter was used ambiguously (it matched a sound in the dictated word) or randomly (it did not match a sound in the dictated words). Because per child the number of dictated words varied that included the first letter of the name, another letter from the name, or a non-name letter, we divided the number of words in which a child had used the focal letter ambiguously or randomly by the total number of words that did or did not include this letter. This resulted in two percentages per letter: random and ambiguous use of the focal letter. For example: Sandra used the first letter of her name in her written
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representation of two out of four dictated words that indeed include an s/z-sound (i.e., dropjeS [liquorices], Sneeuw [snow], dooS [box], and Zon [sun]). This score resulted in a 50% score for ambiguous use of the first letter of her name. Sandra also used S in ten of the 12 other words that do not include S (e.g., moeder [mother], baby [baby], etc.) resulting in an 83% score on random use of the letter S. The same coding was done for each of the other letters in Sandra’s name, that is, for A, N, D and R, and for the three non-name letters M, O, and F that she used in her written representations of dictated words. We thus tested the difference between ambiguous and random use of letters for (1) the first letter of the name (here: S), (2) the other letters of the name (here: A, N, D, and R), and (3) non-name letters appearing in the spelling of words (here: M, O, and F). The children in this study often selected letters from their proper name to write dictated words; on average 52% (SD = 21) of all written letters were letters from the proper name. The first letter of the name occurred as often as other letters of the name. In so far as they used non-name letters, simple forms like O and I dominated. On analyzing the data, we separated children not yet writing phonetically from those who had just started to produce some phonetic spelling. The group not yet writing phonetically (N = 17) characteristically mainly produced random letter strings for the dictated words rarely selecting correct letters (they wrote at most one correct letter in two out of 16 dictated words). The other group who produced some phonetic writing (N = 18), by contrast, chose one or more correct letters in six or more words out of 16 words. Apart from very few exceptions these children did not produce readable invented spellings. Children from both groups were on average 4 years and 6 months old. Ambiguous use of letters was contrasted with random use in both spelling groups. The findings corroborated our hypothesis that phonetic spelling starts with the first letter of the proper name. The percentage of ambiguous use of the first letter from the name (M = 55.4; SD = 39.9) exceeded the percentage of random use among children who had started to write phonetically (M = 37.5; SD = 37.3) The contrast was statistically significant. Hence the ambiguous first letters were not chance hits but indicated that these children often selected the first letter of the name because it represents a sound in the word. By way of contrast, the difference between random and ambiguous first letters of the name was not statistically significant for the group mainly writing random letter strings; mean percentages for random and ambiguous first letters were M = 38.7 (SD = 33.8) and M = 34.5 (SD = 33.2), respectively. These children used the first letter of their name as often randomly as ambiguously, which indicates that at this writing level correctly selected first letters from the name were chance hits and not chosen by the child because he or she had noticed similarity between the proper name and dictated words. All children used one of the other name letters in half of the 16 dictated words. However, both spelling groups used these name letters as often ambiguously as randomly. Apparently, other name letters are known as visual forms that belong to written text but children do not notice similarities between the name and dictated words that motivate them to select these letters and they use them purely randomly. The same was true for non-name letters. By averaging scores for all name letters (except the first letter) and all non-name letters any contrasts between ambiguous and random use of some letters may have been evened out. To test whether other
1 It’s All in the Name
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letters than the first letter of the name were used phonetically, we selected per child another letter, namely one that apart from the first letter of the name most frequently occurred in the 16 dictated words. It could be a non-name letter or a name letter. In many cases O or I frequently occurred probably due to their simplicity. Testing revealed that children from both spelling groups used the thus selected letter as often ambiguously as randomly; the difference between ambiguous and random use was not statistically significant according to a matched-pair Wilcoxon test. These findings suggest that phonetic writing starts with the first letter from the name whichever it is. Ahead of all other letters, children are able to recognize the sound of this letter in dictated words and to correctly represent this letter in the spellings that they make up to represent referents. It is not very plausible that children select the first letters of the name because they are “easy” letters. Inspecting the set of first letters it is striking that this set includes most letters of the alphabet (18 out of 26) and not just “easy forms” like O and I or acrophonic letter names like P or T where the CV format of the name may facilitate acquisition of letter sounds (Foulin, 2005). As yet, the most plausible explanation for phonetic use of the first letter of the name preceding other name letters is that this letter is practiced more than any other letter as a form that relates to a name or sound. Considering that grown-ups often say things like: “That’s your letter, the /ti/ from Tom,” we hypothesize that children start to use the first letter of the name phonetically because they are familiar with this letter and how it sounds in words. A second study (Both-de Vries & Bus, 2009a) was designed to test whether more advanced children generalize phonetic wriiting to other letters from the name. When supporting their children as they try to write unpracticed words parents may use other letters from the name as cues: “It’s /r/ like in Peterrr” (Aram & Levin, 2001). Alternatively, children with an emerging understanding of the alphabetic–phonetic principle (they are able to recognize and write the first letter of the name in spoken words) may, while writing new, not yet practiced words wonder how to represent other unknown sounds. Children may thus elicit instruction in non-name letters and sounds. In the first study children who were just starting phonetic writing, wrote other letters from their name more often than non-name letters, but phonetic writing of these other name letters was a chance hit. We wondered if somewhat more advanced children first expand phonetic writing to other letters from their name and use the other letters from their name more often ambiguously than non-name letters.
Study II: Do Children Generalize Phonetic Writing First to Other Letters from Their Name or Directly to Other Non-name Letters? A second study tested: (1) whether older and more advanced children than those in the first study generalize phonetic writing first to other letters from their name or directly to other non-name letters; and (2) whether in a group of children from low SES families we can replicate that phonetic writing starts with the first letter of the name. Similar to the first study we selected children who used conventional letters to represent their name and other words and we excluded children who merely
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A.C. Both-de Vries and A.G. Bus
produced drawings or writing-like products. Thus, 79 Dutch children aged 4–6 years old (M = 5; 8, range: 4; 3–6; 5) were selected from a complete sample of 88 children from three classrooms of a school in a small town in the Netherlands. Overall these children came from families with low-educated parents. Similar to the first study, in addition to their name the children wrote nine other words: KAAS [cheese], ZAK, [sac], WIP [seesaw], POP [doll], VIS [fish], ZON [sun], PAPA [daddy], MAMA [mommy], and FLIPPO [pog]. The instructions were straightforward: “Write your name” and “Write X” (i.e., ‘vis’ [fish]). PAPA and MAMA were not included in the analyses, because we noticed that children knew these words better than other words (Bus & Out, 2009; Martens, 1999). On average 23% (N = 18) of the group wrote papa and/or mama conventionally, whereas only 13% (N = 10) wrote one or more of the other dictated words conventionally. Per conventional letter we examined: (1) whether the letter was the first or another letter from the name or a letter not from the name; and (2) whether the letters were used randomly or ambiguously. This resulted in two scores per letter: random and ambiguous use. In this study we distinguished three spelling groups. Similar to Study I, some children (N = 26) made random letter strings rarely selecting correct letters (at most one letter in one or two of all dictated words), whereas other somewhat more advanced children (N = 37) wrote one letter correctly in three or more dictated words. Unlike the first study the sample included a third group of more advanced pupils (N = 16) who scored 2 or more correct letters per word resulting in a substantial number of somewhat readable invented spellings. They would write KS instead of KAAS [cheese] or VS instead of VIS [fish]. Quality of name writing differed among the three writing levels; according to a Kruskal Wallis test, this difference was statistically significant, c2 (2, N = 79) = 9.65, p
