The aim of this one year descriptive longitudinal study was to investigate the efficient strategies some competent novice readers used while learning to read in an existing reading programme for which text reading was the main instructional task. The prior teaching of sounds or of words in isolation or in lists was not emphasized in this programme. The authors of the texts tried to use the language of New Zealand Children. These texts provide the support for the Auckland child who comes to the new task of reading with a set of responses learnt from his past experience with oral language. Other important questions of the study related to whether children in such a programme could read not only unseen classroom texts, but also texts from a programme with a decoding emphasis. Fifty-two competent readers were chosen by a stratified random sampling method from 242 six-year-old children attending 20 randomly selected schools in Auckland. Strategy usage in oral reading was related to 3 factors: learning opportunities over time, (at 6:0, 6:6 and 7:0); reader proficiency, (Average, High Average, Good and Excellent); and text difficulty, (Easy, Moderately Difficult, Difficult and Phonically Regular). The children’s performances on oral reading and an oral sentence repetition test at 6:0 and 7:0 were compared. The data comprising errors and self corrections were analyzed at three linguistic levels (graphemic/phonemic, syntactic and semantic), to infer strategies. The Friedman two-way analysis of variance test for related samples was used for most comparisons. Th level of significance was set at p<0.05. The findings suggest that the Auckland child used the facilitating effects of meaning and structure in both reading and sentence repetition tasks. The control which children gained from 6:0 to 7:0 over texts with the decoding emphasis was achieved by attention to both graphemic cues and cues from structure and meaning. The competent novice reader also showed flexibility in selecting different strategies to deal with easy, familiar texts and difficult or novel texts. Such strategies are a necessary part of a model of mature reading which dies not see reading as exclusively the use of anticipatory mechanisms nor solely the use of sequential letter-by-letter processing. The competent novice reader was apparently learning to use either, or combinations, of these processes. The results of the study highlight the complex nature of learning to read and suggest that while some teaching programmes that emphasize a particular learning strategy may be successful, they may not take full advantage of other equally valid strategies which children can develop. / Whole document restricted, but available by request, use the feedback form to request access.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/276929 |
| Date | January 1979 |
| Creators | Ng, Seok Moi |
| Publisher | ResearchSpace@Auckland |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Whole document restricted but available by request. Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated., http://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm, Copyright: The author |
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