The role of lexical analogies in beginning reading: Insights from children's self-reports.

Abstract

The research addresses the role of lexical analogies in early reading by examining variation in children's self-reported strategy choices in the context of a traditional clue-word reading task. Sixty 5-to 6-year-old beginning readers were given a nonword version of a traditional clue-word reading analogy task, and changes in strategies were examined using measures of immediately retrospective verbal reports. The findings revealed that the children's performance was accompanied by their use of a wide repertoire of reading strategies, the most prominent being the use of lexical analogies and grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules. Distinct profiles of reading were derived from an analysis of the children's strategy choice, showing strong patterns of individual differences with regard to the extent to which children reported making analogical responses and applying grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules to aid their nonword reading. The benefits of using immediately retrospective verbal reports of strategies as a way of examining individual differences in children's early reading are discussed.

Variability in children’s early reading strategies

“…Nonetheless, while some researchers argue that such strategies are available to young children in the very early stages of learning to read (Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Goswami, 1988Goswami, , 1990aGoswami, , 1990bGoswami, , 1993, others have documented how children need a well-developed sight vocabulary as a basis for making analogies between familiar and unfamiliar words (Ehri, 1998;Ehri & Robbins, 1992). It is important to note that the former claims are often based on experimental studies that specifically train children to recognise words based on similar rime units using clue-word prompts.…”

“…Ehri, 1998;Treiman, 1993;Treiman, Cassar, & Zukowski, 1994). Reliance solely on phonological strategies can therefore often lead to relatively low levels of word reading accuracy (Farrington-Flint et al, 2008;Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Rittle-Johnson & Siegler, 1999).…”

Early strategies of elementary school children’s single word reading

“…Although a person is aware of the orthographic rules and phonological features of their language, a correct spelling or articulation of a specific word is not guaranteed (Rittle-johnson & Siegler, 1999). Nevertheless, recent studies have shown that the assumptions of the Overlapping Waves Model can be transferred to reading and spelling in the English language Farrington-Flint et al, 2009;Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Siegler, 1988). It is important to emphasize that in these studies, not only indicators were found for variability, adaptive choice, and gradual change in children's strategy use, but also a direct retrieval of facts for reading and writing skills.…”

“…Especially during the acquisition of new skills within an unknown domain, several competing and/or alternative and complement strategies are present in a person's attempt to master a specific task. Variability in children's strategy use is characteristic for skills in academic development: arithmetic (Canobi, 2004;Canobi, Reeve, & Pattison, 2003;Lemaire & Siegler, 1995;Siegler & Shrager,1984), reading (Farrington-Flint, Coyne, Stiller, & Heath, 2008;Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Jorm & Share, 1983) and spelling Kwong & Varnhagen, 2005;Rittle-johnson & Siegler, 1999). In all these domains children rarely apply only one approach to solve a task: in fact, they use several different approaches to attaining a certain goal.…”

“…Strategies in reading development are described in several ways and different theoretical frameworks (Coltheart et al, 1993;Frith, 1985;Marsh et al, 1981). During the acquisition of reading skills, children apply different strategies, for example: phonological strategies -letters and sounds (graphemes and phonemes) are interconnected and manipulated to access a word's meaning (FarringtonFlint et al, 2008;Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Stuart & Coltheart, 1988); orthographic strategies -using analogies from familiar words to ascertain the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word (Farrington-Flint & Wood, 2007;Goswami, 1993a); retrieval strategy -direct recall of a word from the lexical memory due to visual recognition with or without phonological decoding (Share & Stanovich, 1995); combined strategies -retrieval of word parts from memory in addition to reading letter by letter or using analogies for other word parts (Ehri, 1998;Ehri & Robbins, 1992). Research demonstrated that children use variable strategies adaptively and gradually up to the point of automated reading (Ehri,1995(Ehri, ,1998(Ehri, , 2005, which in turn may be described as a continuous retrieval process.…”