The present study was designed to examine differences between subtypes of readers and
spellers in their performance on several phonological, orthographic, and memory tasks. A
central question involved whether subtypes of readers and spellers could be distinguished based
on their performance across the tasks administered. Based on their performance on a
standardized achievement test, fourth and fifth grade children (N=50) were classified as having
no difficulties with reading and spelling (good readers and spellers), difficulties with spelling, but
not reading (mixed readers and spellers), or difficulties with both reading and spelling (poor
readers and spellers). Each student was given a series of tasks to assess their use of
phonological and orthographic information for memory and spelling. These tasks included: 1)
rhyme judgment, 2) cued recall, 3) reading pronounceable pseudowords, 4) deciding which of.
two pseudowords looks most like a real word, and 5) reporting on the kinds of strategies used to
spell words. An error analysis was also conducted. Students with reading and spelling
difficulties performed consistently lower than good and mixed readers and spellers on tasks
assessing their use of phonological information. Good and mixed readers and spellers were not
distinguishable on these tasks. Students with no reading and spelling difficulties or with
spelling difficulties only performed better than poor readers and spellers on some tasks
assessing orthographic processing. Specifically, mixed readers and spellers were distinguishable
from good readers and spellers by their poorer recall of visually similar words. Good and poor
subtypes were not distinguishable on this task. Poor readers and spellers also achieved
comparable scores to the good and mixed readers and spellers on a measure of orthographic
awareness. Overall results provided evidence supporting subtypes of reading and spelling
ability groups. Students with no reading and spelling difficulties, or difficulties with spelling
but not reading were similar in their use of phonological information. However, students with
reading and spelling difficulties were more similar to the good readers and spellers in their use of
orthographic information in memory. The findings from the present study have implications to
subsequent research examining spelling ability, provide further evidence of the unique
processing characteristics of the paradoxical good reader but poor speller, and suggest the
possibility of unique programming needs to remediate spelling difficulties in mixed and poor
readers and spellers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/14624 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Harrison, Gina Louise |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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