Recently, there has been a substantial increase in cross-linguistic research on children’s reading acquisition (e.g., Harris & Hatano, 1999; Joshi & Aaron, 2006). The studies converge on the conclusion that the progress of children learning to read in orthographically consistent languages, such as Finnish, German, or Greek, is generally faster than that of children learning to read in orthographically inconsistent languages, such as English or Danish (e.g., Aro & Wimmer, 2003; Ellis et al., 2004; Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003; Wimmer & Goswami, 1994). In an orthographically consistent language, letters or letter clusters map consistently onto sounds. Conversely, in an orthographically inconsistent language, the relation between letters and sounds is often equivocal. If the consistency of the orthography is an important determinant of the rate of reading acquisition, the next question is naturally to what extent reading depends on the same underlying cognitive skills across these languages.
Rapid naming speed and reading across languages that vary in orthographic consistency
George K. Georgiou, Rauno Parrila, Chen-Huei Liao
Reading & Writing (2008) 21:885–903
Haven't read the article yet - & have yet to tackle the concept of "RAN" - so this will have to do for now.
I'm curious as to exactly what is inconsistent about Danish orthography. It's true that some of the vowels have quite similar sounds, but they are different--y doesn't sound *exactly* like u, just similar. There are a lot of silent or almost-silent consonants, would that be it? I learned Danish as a teen and always found the spelling (and grammar) to be very easy compared to English. The pronunciation was the difficult part.
ReplyDeleteIf I'd gotten you in the Imaginary Christmas Draw Gift Exchange, I'd have purchased Brain Literacy for Educators and Psychologists by Berninger & Richards. Didn't have anything directly on RAN, though. (ISBN 0-12-092871-X)
ReplyDeleteWolf gives good introduction to RAN and reading in Proust and the Squid, which would also have been on the list.
PS Loved the Barney wine & cheese fest.
As to RAN, there's a good bit about it in Wolf's Dyslexia, Fluency and the Brain.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth Haughton has a program to improve children's (or adult's) skills in this area. It has a neurological basis - as does nearly everything we do -- but is amenable to targeted intervention. Wolf's own program is aimed at students with fairly good language skills in many areas. I haven't seen data yet on its use with children with severe language delays or very low SES. It looks good but might not be high priority for many children I see.
There is lots in the research literature recently on the orthographic memory/processing issues -- both in the Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading journal and in the journal of the International Dyslexia Association. If I recall correctly, some of Perfetti's group are working on this. It interests me because I have seen a number of children in recent years with severe reading delays who have no problem with phonological skills, IQ, working memory or vocabulary.
I learned Danish as a teen and always found the spelling (and grammar) to be very easy compared to English.
ReplyDeleteInteresting.
This is all new to me.
The Berninger book looks great.
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to invest in it until I get a little ways into "Neuroeducation," however.
I've got Proust & Squid -- I'm thinking I may read that as soon as I finish the first McGuinness book.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny: I've wanted to read about "normal learning" & reading before getting into dyslexia & reading problems.
For some reason this has felt like the best route, in spite of the fact that the kids I'm concerned with both have autism.
Society for the Scientific Studies of Reading journal and in the journal of the International Dyslexia Association
ReplyDeleteWhat are the titles of these journals?
Is Reading and Writing worth reading?
(Seems so to me, but I don't know...)
I have seen a number of children in recent years with severe reading delays who have no problem with phonological skills, IQ, working memory or vocabulary.
ReplyDeletewow!
Also: where are we on comprehension??
Is it true there are lots of kids who decode fluently but have extremely poor reading comprehension?
That's certainly true of me in Spanish & French (and, to be honest, probably in German & Italian...)
AND: what do we know about people who learn foreign languages to very high levels of fluency??
ReplyDeleteApparently the Foreign Service has a rating system for language proficiency (I think Concerned Parent knows about this) - and some non-native speakers actually reach native levels of proficiency...I once talked to someone whose sister had done this.
I'm pretty sure there's some kind of autism connection to foreign language learning.
ReplyDeleteSome of you may remember Annabel Stehli, whose daughter (have forgotten her name) was supposedly cured of autism by auditory processing therapy.
I say "supposedly" because to me she didn't look at all cured; she looked extremely high functioning.
As an adult, she was an extremely proficient learner of foreign languages. She knew several of them, all of which she'd learned as an adult. (I have no idea what her reading comprehension or accent were like....but she was obviously telling the truth about picking up so many languages.)
Is it true there are lots of kids who decode fluently but have extremely poor reading comprehension?
ReplyDeleteNot really. You find the phenomenon of children who decode very well but understand almost nothing in only two populations: children with intellectual disabilities and children with very limited English.
In both groups you occasionally find students who quickly master the alphabetic principle, learn the required correspondences between sounds and symbols, and may even grasp patterns of speech and inflection, but do not know enough language to make sense of what they are reading. They lack the vocabulary, the syntactical sense (pronoun referents, subordinate clauses etc.)
In neither case (IMO) is it a problem that the student can decode well; the teaching challenge is to build the student's language comprehension in a variety of ways.
I often hear teachers say they have students who are "great decoders" and "poor comprehenders." I decided to investigate this phenomenon. I waved some $50 bills at a teachers' meeting and offered $200 to anyone who could find such a student for me who was NOT clearly an ELL case or a student with cognitive challenges.
I asked them to discriminate by using a simple task: take an example of text that the child can readily "decode" but can't "comprehend." Read the text to him or her, and do some oral comprehension items.
If the child can't answer the ORAL comprehension questions, you are not looking at a "reading" problem -- you have a language problem. Maybe vocabulary, maybe background knowledge, maybe receptive language comprehension generally --but not "reading."
On the other hand, if you have a child who understands material read aloud at a high level, but can't READ that text, you (usually) have a decoding problem.
We had a principal who used to tell staff that the school had lots of "great decoders" who were "poor comprehenders." (I think they tell them this stuff at principals' meetings.)
One year we tested the entire middle school (1:1 testing, more accurate). Guess what we found? We had NO students who were "great decoders" but "poor comprehenders," except for a few individuals in the recent immigrant or intellectually disabled group. We had DOZENS -- maybe a hundred -- kids who were poor DECODERS -- in almost every instance, they did not know vowel sounds, vowel digraphs/teams, or how to sound out multisyllable words. EVERY SINGLE KID said that their "strategy" for figuring out an unknown word was to "look at the first letter and guess." Now, where did they get that idea?
Something about DATA, as opposed to perception, changed attitudes. The principal started to encourage teaching decoding skills (without neglecting other important areas). Teachers became more aware of the need to teach kids to sound out words, to learn morphemes, word parts, and strategies for combining and disassembling them.
Now when we find kids who decode adequately, but are poor comprehenders, we usually see issues of rate and fluency. Children in eighth grade reading sixty words per minute can't keep up (Heck, sixty wpm won't cut it in FOURTH grade). So we work on that.
Stanovich somewhere put out a call in The Reading Teacher for data on students who were "great decoders" who could not understand what they read, and he got no useful case studies. Most students whom teachers refer to as "great decoders" are actually nothing of the kind -- if you measure what they do, they often lack critical decoding skills and read relatively slowly, so that the meaning of complex text gets lost in the effort required.