Remediation of skills deficient in students with dyslexia typically occurs via withdrawal interventions focusing on phonological awareness and letter-sound knowledge. While one-on-one interventions are widely used, little attention has been paid to the alternative teaching approach of integrating multiple linguistic component interventions within the classroom. Accordingly, this study aims to examine the effectiveness of using word study within the classroom on the spelling skills of students with dyslexia. The study was divided into two parts: 1) examining the efficacy of incorporating a small group multiple linguistic intervention within the classroom on the spelling skills of 9-year-old students with dyslexia, and if there were similar effects for reading abilities; and 2) analysing the effects of word study instruction at the whole group level on student spelling. Two case study students (both 9-years of age) with dyslexia underwent small group multiple linguistic intervention, and were monitored for 8 weeks (3 days/week; 20 minutes/session) using baseline, intervention and post-intervention probes. Whole group word study instruction was enacted in a Year 4/5 classroom for 8 weeks (1 day/week; 1 hour/session), and the spelling performance of the 9-year-old students (i.e., n = 7) were compared to same age students from a control classroom (i.e., n = 7) in pre-post assessments. Both small group intervention case study students demonstrated significant improvements in spelling, yet minimal improvement was seen for reading. Whole group comparisons indicated no significant improvement. The findings for this study have implications for: a) research on effective interventions for older children with dyslexia, and b) the practical use of spelling interventions that are designed to co-exist within classroom instruction.

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo principal investigar o desenvolvimento da consciência morfológica e o seu papel na ampliação do vocabulário, das habilidades de leitura e de escrita. Para contemplar este objetivo, foi realizado um programa de intervenção em consciência morfológica baseado na sensibilização em morfemas e em estratégias de formação de palavras. Participaram da pesquisa 44 alunos do 3º ano escolar de uma escola pública da cidade de São Paulo. Era esperado que a intervenção produzisse um efeito na habilidade dos alunos do grupo experimental na resolução das tarefas de consciência morfológica (tarefa de Produção de Neologismo, Analogia de Palavras, Derivação em Contexto), vocabulário (Tarefa de Definição), compreensão na leitura de texto (teste de Cloze), fluência de leitura (tarefa de LUMP) e escrita de palavras (tarefa de Ditado). Além disso, era esperado observar um fortalecimento da relação entre a consciência morfológica e as outras variáveis psicolinguísticas incluídas na pesquisa. Em termos de resultados, verificou-se a ampliação da consciência morfológica derivacional, no trato tanto de prefixos, quanto sufixos ao longo do tempo. Este desenvolvimento foi ainda mais expressivo nas crianças do grupo experimental, comparado ao controle. O impacto positivo e significativo do programa de intervenção em consciência morfológica ocorreu principalmente sobre as variáveis que mediam este conhecimento. Além disso foi investigado o papel da consciência morfológica para a ampliação das habilidades em vocabulário, leitura e escrita sendo atestado apenas para a primeira. Com isso, destaca-se especialmente o valor da intervenção em potencializar o desenvolvimento da consciência morfológica na reflexão e produção de palavras por crianças ao final do ciclo de alfabetização / This research aims to investigate the development of morphological awareness and its role in expanding vocabulary, reading and writing skills. In order to contemplate this objective, a morphological awareness intervention program based on sensitization in morphemes and word formation strategies was carried out. The study included 44 students from the 3rd year of a public school in the city of São Paulo. It was expected that the intervention would have an effect on the ability of students in the experimental group to solve tasks of morphological awareness (task of Neologism Production, Analogy of Words, Derivation in Context), vocabulary (Definition Task), reading comprehension (Cloze test), reading fluency (LUMP task) and word writing (dictation task). In addition, it was expected to observe a strengthening of the relationship between the morphological awareness and the other psycholinguistic variables included in the research. In terms of results, there was an increase in derivational morphological awareness, in the treatment of both prefixes and suffixes over time. This development was even more significant in the children of the experimental group compared to control. The positive and significant impact of the intervention program on morphological awareness occurred mainly on the variables that measure this knowledge. In addition, the role of morphological awareness for the expansion of vocabulary, reading and writing abilities was attested only to the former. Thus, the value of intervention in enhancing the development of morphological awareness in the reflection and production of words by children at the end of the literacy cycle is particularly noteworthy

The aim of this longitudinal study was to examine the contribution of phonological, morphological and dialect awareness to the prediction of reading and spelling in a Greek bi-dialectal setting. The target group (N=404) consisted of children, aged 6 to 9 years at the start of the project, who learn literacy in Cyprus, where a dialect is spoken in certain contexts but where Standard Modern Greek is also widely used. At present there are few studies with Greek Cypriot children on how phonological, morphological and dialect awareness relates to reading and spelling. Because there are no standardised measures of phonological, morphological and dialect awareness with Greek Cypriot children, measures of these factors were developed during the pilot study and their internal consistency was assessed. With the larger sample the measures were validated by examining their construct validity. The first wave of data collection showed that morphological and dialect awareness make unique contribution to the prediction of reading and spelling in Greek. The second wave of data collection showed that the measures of morphological and dialect awareness predicted performance in reading and spelling eight months later, even partialling out grade level, estimation of verbal intelligence and initial scores in reading and spelling. A model with dialect awareness as a mediator between phonological and morphological awareness and reading and spelling fitted the data better than a model with phonological or morphological awareness as mediators, and hence, phonological awareness and morphological awareness help children to become aware of the differences between their dialect and the standard variety, and dialect awareness in turn facilitates reading and spelling. Cross-lagged correlations showed that the more experience children have with reading and spelling, the more likely they are to develop morphological and dialect awareness. This study makes theoretical, empirical and practical educational contributions. The established mediational model contributes to the theoretical knowledge of the connection between dialect awareness and phonological and morphological awareness and reading and spelling while the longitudinal study contributes to theory the long term relation of morphological and dialect awareness with reading and spelling in Greek. Empirically, the study established the plausibility of a causal link between morphological and dialect awareness and reading and spelling, which must be tested in further research using intervention methods. In practice, this study contributes valid measures for assessing morphological and dialect awareness in the Greek Cypriot setting.

ABSTRACT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND READING IN BILINGUAL ENGLISH-ARABIC CHILDREN by Lama K. Farran This dissertation examined the relationship between language and reading in bilingual English-Arabic children. The dissertation followed a two chapter Review and Research Format. Chapter One presents a review of research that examined the relationship between oral language and reading development in bilingual English-Arabic children. Chapter Two describes the study that examined this same relationship. Participants were 83 third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade children who attended a charter school in a large school district in the Southeastern portion of the US. The school taught Arabic as a second language daily in the primary and elementary grades. This cross-sectional quantitative study used norm-referenced assessments and experimental measures. Data were analyzed using simultaneous and hierarchical regression to identify language predictors of reading. Analysis of covariance was used to examine whether the language groups differed in their Arabic reading comprehension scores, while controlling for age. Results indicated that phonological awareness in Arabic was related to phonological awareness in English. However, morphological awareness in Arabic was not related to morphological awareness in English. Results also revealed that phonological awareness predicted word reading, pseudoword decoding, and complex word reading fluency within Arabic and English; morphological awareness predicted complex word reading fluency in Arabic but not in English; and vocabulary predicted reading comprehension within Arabic and English. Further analyses indicated that children with high vocabulary differed from children with low vocabulary in their reading comprehension scores and that this difference was driven by children’s ability to read unvowelized words. Consistent with the extended version of the Triangle Model of Reading (Bishop & Snowling, 2004), the results suggest a division of labor among various language components in the process of word reading and reading comprehension. Implications for research, instruction, and early intervention with bilingual English-Arabic children are discussed.

Studies in alphabetic languages suggest the presence of morphological processing in reading already at the beginning of learning (Casalis et al, 2015). The linguistic characteristics of Arabic, particularly its richness in morphological derivations, could have implications for the acquisition of reading and spelling. In expert readers, studies with priming techniques showed morphological decomposition of Arabic words (Boudelaa and Marslen-Wilson, 2015) but there is almost no research available on beginning readers. In addition, derived words in Arabic (example: kātib) are formed from the combination of a consonantal root (K-T-B) and a vocal pattern (_ā_i_). These two morphemes cannot be isolated either aurally or visually as independent units but are part of an abstract mental representation. This could make their identification difficult for beginning readers. Our thesis aims at evaluating the presence of morphological processes in the recognition of written words, with 139 Lebanese children, from the first to the fourth grade. In a first cross-sectional study, we examined the effect of root and pattern frequency on reading and the contribution of morphological and phonological knowledge to the reading of words and pseudowords and to the comprehension of written words. In the second study, we looked for the presence of this effect in spelling. The third study is longitudinal. The same children carried out, one year after the first evaluation, the tests of the cross-sectional study.The results suggest that the ability to read and spell in Arabic is influenced very early by the awareness of the morphological composition, more specifically the familiarity with the patterns. / Les études sur les langues alphabétiques suggèrent la présence de traitements morphologiques en lecture même en début d’apprentissage (Casalis et al, 2015). Les spécificités linguistiques de l’arabe, plus particulièrement la richesse en dérivations morphologiques, pourraient avoir des implications sur l’acquisition de la lecture et de l’orthographe. Les études par des techniques d’amorçage ont montré une décomposition morphologique des mots en arabe chez le lecteur expert (Boudelaa et Marslen-Wilson, 2015) mais il n’y a presque pas de recherches disponibles sur le début d’apprentissage. Par ailleurs, les mots dérivés en arabe (exemple :kātib) sont formés à partir de la combinaison d’une racine consonantique (k-t-b) et d’un schème vocalique (_ā_i_). Ces deux morphèmes ne peuvent être isolés auditivement ou visuellement en unités indépendantes mais ils font partie d’une représentation mentale abstraite. Ceci pourrait rendre leur identification difficile pour des apprentis lecteurs. Notre thèse vise l’évaluation de la présence de traitements morphologiques dans la reconnaissance des mots écrits, auprès de 139 enfants libanais, de la première à la quatrième année de primaire. Dans une première étude transversale, nous avons examiné l’effet de la fréquence de la racine et du schème sur la lecture ainsi que la contribution des connaissances morphologiques et phonologiques à la lecture de mots et de pseudomots et à la compréhension de mots écrits. Dans la deuxième étude, nous avons recherché la présence de cet effet en orthographe. La troisième étude est longitudinale. Les mêmes enfants ont effectué, un an après la première passation, les tests de l’étude transversale.Les résultats suggèrent que la capacité de lecture et d’orthographe en arabe est influencée très tôt par la prise de conscience de la composition morphologique, plus spécifiquement la familiarité avec les schèmes. / Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

xvi, 144 p. : col. ill. / The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires the US educational systems to provide effective instruction for all students to be successful in reading. It is generally accepted that there are five essential components for effective reading instruction: phonological awareness, alphabetic understanding, vocabulary, fluency, and reading comprehension. However, the role of morphological awareness is gaining greater attention. This study focused on understanding the role of morphological awareness in relation to the more commonly accepted aspects of literacy instruction. The purpose of this study was to complete a meta-analysis on how specific aspects of morphological awareness relates to different components of literacy (i.e., word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling) in elementary-aged students of different grade levels and learner types. Specific procedures were used to identify relevant research that examined both morphological awareness and reading measures resulting in the identification of 44 studies. These studies were then coded for specific features and to capture and generate effect sizes for analysis. Results indicated a positive, strong relationship between morphological awareness in general and each literacy skill (i.e., word reading, reading comprehension, and spelling) in elementary students. No significant difference in the mean relationship between morphological awareness and reading outcomes was found for each of the following variables: (a) grade (lower versus upper elementary aged-students); (b) learner type (typical versus struggling and mixed learners); and (c) morphology type (derivational versus inflectional morphology). However, medium to large effects were found across each of these variables. Results were significantly impacted by a number of factors including the implemented coding procedures and features of the studies included in this meta-analysis (e.g., researcher developed measures, variation in defining student populations, etc.). However, a major factor that impacted addressing each specific research question was the limited number of effect sizes available for this meta-analysis. Suggestions for future research and general education implications are provided. Additional research in this area will improve the field by providing a better understanding of the role of morphological awareness within literacy instruction to potentially enable teachers to better meet the needs of all students. / Committee in charge: Beth Harn, Chairperson; Robert Horner, Member; Joe Stevens, Member; Eric Pederson, Outside Member

The aim of this thesis is to research the influence of phonological and morphological awareness on reading of primary school children (second to fifth grade). Until recently, the research of morphological influence on reading had received little attention by researchers and educators. The thesis is divided into two parts ? the theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part is concern with the characteristic of dependent variables (reading speed, reading comprehension) and independent variables (phonological and morphological awareness). It also sheds light on reading literacy. The practical part is concern with the research of these effects. There have been set up the targets and hypotheses and characterized the sample of examined children. It has been also described the testing methods themselves, which had been used, as well as the procedure at the tests assignment. Especially the research results and their interpretation were introduced in the thesis.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2016-01-04T10:25:15Z No. of bitstreams: 1 brunostefaniferreiradeoliveira.pdf: 714261 bytes, checksum: ee8494fe1d9b406575240e4e36235327 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2016-01-25T15:35:37Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 brunostefaniferreiradeoliveira.pdf: 714261 bytes, checksum: ee8494fe1d9b406575240e4e36235327 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-01-25T15:35:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 brunostefaniferreiradeoliveira.pdf: 714261 bytes, checksum: ee8494fe1d9b406575240e4e36235327 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-02-23 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / - / Research conducted in several countries has shown the importance of morphology in literacy. However, the results of the studies conducted in Brazilian−Portuguese are still inconsistent. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between morphological awareness and morphological processing and reading in Brazilian−Portuguese. The study included 141 children from Grades 2−5 from private schools. Morphological awareness, phonological awareness, phonological memory and nonverbal intelligence were evaluated. Also an experimental task of lexical decision with priming technique was developed, to assess the morphological processing. The results indicated that the relationship between morphological awareness and reading appears only when the children analyzed were in the Grade 1 and Grade 5. The morphological awareness explains 10% of the reading ability, when controlled other variables in the regression analysis assessed. The morphological processing is perceived in children from Grade 2 and gradually developed until the Grade 1, when it is possible to notice a pattern similar to adults. There was no correlation between morphological awareness and morphological processing. Therefore, morphological awareness has a very important function in children from Grade 4, which reinforces the importance of teaching strategies in literacy that take into account the function of the ability to manipulate the words in the morpheme level.

Vocabulary development is important when it comes to learning a language, but it is also a challenging task. The Swedish syllabus focuses on implicit knowledge, and explicit teaching has been shown to have a positive impact on learners’ implicit knowledge. Therefore, this research synthesis explores to what extent explicit morphological teaching can be beneficial and improve vocabulary development for older adolescent and adult learners of English as a foreign language. It also explores how these findings are related to the English syllabus for upper secondary education in Sweden. The methods include searching several electronic databases with specific related search terms and using inclusion and exclusion criteria to obtain relevant articles. The research synthesis compiles the findings of a total of eight articles on both the effect of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. The results indicate that explicit morphology instruction has a positive outcome for learners of English as a foreign language in both receptive and productive vocabulary, and, that it may be a useful teaching method. Finally, the results correlate with previous research and with the Swedish steering documents and the communicative classroom in the Swedish context. For further research, it would be of interest to see if the results are applicable in a Swedish context, and thus, further studies in a Swedish context are encouraged.

This thesis examined the role of metalinguistic skills in concurrent and subsequent word-level reading and oral vocabulary among Chinese-English bilingual children who learned Chinese as their heritage language and English as their societal language. While previous studies on biliteracy development among this group of children have mostly focused on one of the two languages, this thesis gave equal emphasis to both languages. The research had two general purposes: 1) to investigate the role of phonological awareness, morphological awareness and orthographic processing in predicting word-level reading and oral vocabulary in Chinese and English concurrently and longitudinally; and 2) to examine the cross-linguistic role of phonological and morphological awareness to word-level reading and vocabulary, concurrently and longitudinally, between Chinese and English. These goals were explored through two interrelated studies, using path analyses. The participants included 91 Chinese-English bilingual children, recruited from kindergarten and Grade 1 Chinese heritage language classes in Canada. They were tested twice, one year apart, on a battery of cognitive and literacy measures in Chinese and English. Findings of Study 1 on within-language relationships indicated that, for word-level reading, all three metalinguistic skills were independent concurrent predictors in English, whereas only morphological awareness was predictive in Chinese. For oral vocabulary, morphological awareness was the only concurrent predictor in both languages. The longitudinal contributions of these metalinguistic skills were mostly mediated through the auto-regressors of the literacy outcomes. Findings of Study 2 on between-language relationships demonstrated that Chinese phonological awareness directly contributed to concurrent and subsequent English word reading beyond the effect of concurrent English phonological awareness. Yet, Chinese morphological awareness indirectly predicted concurrent and subsequent English oral vocabulary through concurrent English morphological awareness. Similarly, English morphological awareness only indirectly predicted concurrent and subsequent Chinese oral vocabulary. These findings suggest that different metalinguistic skills are required for literacy development in Chinese and English. Moreover, metalinguistic skills transfer to literacy, even across two typologically distant languages, but the transfer patterns of phonological and morphological awareness to different literacy skills vary considerably. These results are discussed in light of current reading and transfer models as well as linguistic contexts of biliteracy acquisition.