Spellings of Words Study Guide

(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:____Candace Poovey________________________________________

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?

~I believe knowing a word means many things.  For one, it means to know how to pronounce that word.  It also means knowing what the word means and how to use it properly in a sentence.

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.  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?

~I can’t think of any word in particular right now, but when I do come across a word I don’t know, I look back at the text and try to look at the context clues to get an idea of what the word means.  Sometimes if I can’t tell from the context I will look it up in the dictionary if I really need to know what it means.

Do you think you learned the word’s meaning? Can you identify its meaning if you were presented its spelling?

~Sometimes I learn the meaning, and sometimes I do not.  If the word is presented several times then I will probably learn what it means and remember it, so I could identify it in a later reading.  If I only see it one time and don’t look it up I probably will not remember it.

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?
~ The 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.

2. Who were the subjects?

~ In the first experiment, the participants were 20 second graders, with a mean age of 7 years and 7 months, enrolled in an urban school with a large minority population.  On average, these students were reading at a second grade level; however, their vocabulary level was below average.  In the second experiment, the participants were fifth graders from the same lower SES school as the second graders.

3. What were the experimental conditions?

~ Each student was taught the pronunciations and meanings of two sets of six concrete nouns. Spellings were shown as students learned one set. Spellings were not shown as students learned the other set.  During learning, the words were not only defined but also embedded in different sentences to clarify meanings and connections to other words.

4. What did the treatment involve?

~In the spelling present treatment condition, an initial study trial occurred first. The six words, their spellings, and their meanings were introduced. 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. 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.

On pronunciation recall trials, the student saw each drawing with no spelling present and tried to recall its pronunciation. The experimenter gave the correct answer by pronouncing the word, showing its spelling, giving its definition, and using the word in a sentence. The student repeated the word and sentence.

On definition recall trials, the student heard each word pronounced, saw its spelling, and tried to recall its meaning. The experimenter supplied the correct answer by giving the word’s definition followed by a clarifying sentence. The student repeated the word and its meaning.

In the spelling absent control condition, the procedures were the same except that the spellings of words were never shown. Students pronounced the words several more times than students in the spelling present condition.

5. Which group (spelling-present vs. spelling-absent) gained more in vocabulary learning?  How were the groups’ recall of pronunciations affected by the treatment?

~Recall was superior when spellings were seen than when they were not seen.  Findings showed that after one day, students still recalled pronunciations better when they had seen spellings than when they had not, indicating that the impact of spellings lasted beyond the end of training.  From this study we conclude that second graders learned the pronunciations and meanings of vocabulary words better when they were exposed to spellings of the words than when they only practiced speaking 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?

~The students who were already high on a word reading task benefited more from the spelling aids than the lower students because they were at an advantage of already having more background/content knowledge.  Higher readers had better knowledge not only of grapho-phonemic  units but also of larger syllabic spelling units than lower readers, and this gave the higher readers an advantage in forming connections to store multisyllabic words in memory. Those with rich orthographic knowledge acquire richer and richer vocabularies over time compared to those with poorer orthographic knowledge.

7. What general conclusions were derived from the study findings by the authors? What implications were offered for vocabulary learning and instruction?

~Spellings helped readers with the harder part of vocabulary learning, remembering pronunciations of words. Why meanings were especially easy to remember in this study may be explained by several factors known to facilitate vocabulary learning (Sadoski, 2005). The words were all concrete nouns. Use of pictures enabled the formation of visual images in memory. Embedding words in multiple defining and clarifying sentences helped connect them to other known words and concepts.

8. What questions do you have from the article? List them here.

~I thought this article was very helpful in explaining ways in which children can learn and know the spellings and pronunciations of words.  I don’t really have any questions I can think of now.