Study Guide: Spellings of words: A neglected facilitator of vocabulary learning by Ehri & Rosenthal (2007)
Name: Stacy Oxford
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.
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?
Do you think you learned the word’s meaning? Can you identify its meaning if you were presented its spelling?
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 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, average age 7 years, 7 months, enrolled in an urban school with large minority population. On average these students were reading at the second grade level. In the second experiment the participants were fifth graders from the same lower SES school as the second graders. These students were divided into two groups that differed in their orthographic knowledge: 14 higher level readers and 18 lower level readers.
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. Word cards were also displayed with a drawing of the object named by the noun and a spelling printed beneath the picture. The recall of the words’ pronunciations and meanings were also tested.
4. What did the treatment involve? Pronunciation and definition recalls. During the pronunciation recall, the student saw each drawing with no spelling present and tried to recall its pronunciation. Then the experimenter gave the correct answer by pronouncing the word, showing its spelling, giving its definition, and embedding the word in a clarifying sentence. The student then repeated the word and the sentence. During the definition recall, the student heard each word pronounced, saw its spelling, and tried to recall its meaning. Then the experimenter supplied the correct answer by giving the word’s definition followed by a clarifying sentence. The student then repeated the word and its 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? The spelling-present group gained more in vocabulary learning. When spellings were seen, heard, and repeated by the child, grapho-phonemic connections were spontaneously made to secure the pronunciations in memory.
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 higher readers had better knowledge not only of grapho-phonemic units but also of larger syllabic spelling units than lower readers, which gave higher readers an advantage in forming connections to store multisyllabic words in memory.
7. What general conclusions were derived from the study findings by the authors? What implications were offered for vocabulary learning and instruction? Teachers need to become aware of the importance of spellings for vocabulary learning so they do not slight them in their teaching. Also when teachers encounter, pronounce, and explain new vocabulary words to their students, they should take time to display the spellings of the words. Students in higher grade levels who are reading independently and come to a vocabulary word they do not know are encouraged to stop and find out the meaning of the word and also decode and pronounce the spelling.
8. What questions do you have from the article? List them here.
