Guiding Children's Invented Spellings: A Gateway Into Literacy Learning

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Guiding Children's Invented Spellings: AGateway Into Literacy LearningGene Ouellette a , Monique Sénéchal b & Allyson Haley ca Mount Allison University , Canadab Carleton University , Canadac University of New Brunswick , CanadaPublished online: 08 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Gene Ouellette , Monique Sénéchal & Allyson Haley (2013) Guiding Children'sInvented Spellings: A Gateway Into Literacy Learning, The Journal of Experimental Education, 81:2,261-279, DOI: 10.1080/00220973.2012.699903

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THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL EDUCATION, 81(2), 261–279, 2013Copyright C© Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0022-0973 print/1940-0683 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00220973.2012.699903

LEARNING, INSTRUCTION, AND COGNITION

Guiding Children’s Invented Spellings: A GatewayInto Literacy Learning

Gene OuelletteMount Allison University, Canada

Monique SenechalCarleton University, Canada

Allyson HaleyUniversity of New Brunswick, Canada

This teaching study tested whether guiding invented spelling through a Vygotskian approach tofeedback would facilitate kindergarten children’s entry into literacy more so than phonologicalawareness instruction. Participants included 40 kindergarteners whose early literacy skills were typicalof literacy-rich classrooms, and who were receiving a structured balanced literacy curriculum. Thechildren were randomly assigned to one of two teaching conditions (phonological awareness; inventedspelling) and participated in 16 teaching sessions over an 8-week period in kindergarten. Before theseteaching sessions, the groups were equivalent in early literacy and language skills including alphabeticknowledge, phonological awareness and oral vocabulary. Children in both conditions saw growth inalphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness (marked by large effect sizes), but the invented-spelling group showed more growth in invented spelling sophistication and learned to read more wordson posttest. These advantages were reflected in medium to large effect sizes. Follow-up assessment inGrade 1 revealed potential lasting advantages for the invented spelling group. These findings supportthe view that with guidance and developmentally appropriate feedback, invented spelling promotesearly literacy by providing a milieu for children to explore the relations between oral and writtenlanguage.

Keywords elementary school, instruction, literacy, reading, spelling, writing

This research was funded by grants to Gene Ouellette and Monique Senechal from the Canadian Council on Learningand the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The authors thank the children, parents, teachers,administrators and school personnel of New Brunswick District 2.

Address correspondence to Gene P. Ouellette, Psychology Department, 49A York Street, Mount Allison University,Sackville, New Brunswick, E4L 1C7 Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

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262 OUELLETTE, SENECHAL, AND HALEY

YOUNG CHILDREN WHO HAVE STRONG early literacy skills in kindergarten tend to acquirereading and writing more easily in Grade 1 than do children who have weaker literacy skills. Earlydifferences in literacy tend to be remarkably stable over time (Lonigan, Burgess, & Anthony,2000; Scarborough, 1998). As a result of this stability, educators and researchers alike haveexamined how to promote early literacy to ensure children’s eventual success in learning to readand write. Considerable intervention research has shown that promoting phonological awarenessand letter knowledge has positive effects on children’s early literacy outcomes (see meta-analysesof Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999; Ehri, Nunes, Willows, Schuster, Yaghoub-Zadeh, & Shanahan,2001). In the present research, we tested whether promoting another early literacy skill, namely,children’s exploration of the writing system through invented spelling, would be a more efficientway to facilitate children’s entry into reading and writing.

Invented spelling refers to the self-directed attempts of young children to represent words inprint. This experimentation with writing often begins before children receive any formal literacyinstruction (Read, 1971). Descriptive studies have detailed how invented spellings increase insophistication over time as children move from scribbles to a gradual representation of the soundstructure of words, albeit not necessarily in a conventional manner. For example, Gentry and Gillet(1993) detailed how once children begin to understand the alphabetic principle, they typically startto capture the initial sounds in words such as spelling LADY with just an L (possibly followed byrandom letters). Final sounds are then represented as children become more sophisticated in theirabilities, followed by a marking of medial vowels. For example, a child may progress from thefirst example to spelling LADY as LD, and then as LAD. Note how in this final example, the lettername for D quite nicely represents the sound of the final syllable in LADY . This would representwhat Gentry and Gillet (1993) described as the phonetic level of spelling, whereby all sounds ina word are represented (in some form) in print. According to such developmental theory, childrenthen progress through a transitional phase of applying their growing orthographic knowledgewhile spelling (Berninger, 1995), eventually leading to a conventional level of accuracy (Gentry& Gillet, 1993; Henderson, 1981). More recently, it has been suggested that the process ofinvented spelling may help make more explicit the connections between letters, sounds, andwords (Ouellette & Senechal, 2008a). This brings forth the possibility that invented spelling maybe an important gateway into literacy learning; a possibility suggested by correlational studiesthat have repeatedly shown that more sophisticated invented spelling is associated with advancedreading skills (Caravolas, Hulme, & Snowling, 2001; Clarke, 1988; Morris & Perney, 1984).In the research reported here, we tested this possibility directly by delivering a Vygotskian-oriented teaching program to help kindergarten children increase the sophistication of their owninvented spellings and then evaluated them on a learn-to-read task. We also assessed the studentsapproximately 9 months later in Grade 1 to evaluate any lasting benefits of our kindergartenteaching program.

Invented Spelling and Teaching

In his pioneering writing, Charles Read (1971) brought invented spelling to the forefront ofscientific inquiry and educational practice. By carefully describing patterns in unconventionalspellings produced by young children, Read (1971) showed that there was an underlying logicin the apparent errors made by children, a logic based on emerging understanding of linguisticprinciples. As detailed earlier, subsequent stage theories of invented spelling have since proposed

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GUIDING CHILDREN’S INVENTED SPELLINGS 263

that invented spelling progresses from an initial reliance on sounds (phonology) in translatingwhat is heard into print, to a gradual incorporation of word-specific letter patterns or orthography(Ehri, 1989; Ferreiro, 1991; Gentry & Gillet, 1993; Henderson, 1981; Treiman, 1993). As childrenprogress through stages of invented spelling, their attempts to represent words in print graduallycome to resemble conventionally correct spellings. These descriptive findings led to the view thatchildren might teach themselves about the reading process when exploring print through inventedspelling (Ferreiro & Teberosky, 1982).

It should be noted that Read (1971) never explicitly wrote that invented spelling should beseen as self-teaching or be accepted as correct in the conventional sense. What Read (1971)described was how invented spelling offers a glimpse into a young child’s developing knowledgeof how spoken language is represented in print and how this knowledge increases over time. Inthis respect, invented spelling can be seen as a window into emerging literacy skills (Ouellette &Senechal, 2008a) and, hence, provides an opportunity for instruction geared toward each child’sdevelopmental level. That is, given that invented spelling is a developmental process and that itreflects a young child’s present understanding of how words are represented in print, it is wellpositioned for use within a zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1962) approach to teaching,where the child can be guided to the level of spelling sophistication just beyond their present one.It was more than 15 years ago that Invernizzi, Abouzeid, and Gill (1994), following the writing ofChomsky (1971), pointed out that this potential use of invented spelling as a teaching tool withina Vygotskian teaching perspective was being overlooked; the same can largely be said today.

Rekindling this notion, Martins and Silva (2006; see also Silva & Martins, 2003) recentlyreported a teaching paradigm in which young Portuguese children were shown invented spellingsjust slightly more complex than their own. The feedback was consistent with descriptions ofinvented spelling stages in which children progress from representing only the first sound ina word accurately, to representing the initial and final sounds, to also marking a vowel in themedial position. By showing spellings that were theoretically within a child’s zone of proximaldevelopment, the opportunity for growth was created by having the children think about thedifferences between their own invented spelling and that being shown to them. Children whoreceived this teaching program (delivered in 8 sessions over a 2-week period) demonstratedincreased sophistication in invented spelling as well as growth in phonological awareness, relativeto comparison children. These results confirm both the effectiveness of such teaching approachesin improving invented spelling and the relevance of invented spelling in emerging phonologicalawareness. Whether growth in invented spelling was linked directly to reading, however, was notevaluated.

This possibility was tested by Ouellette and Senechal (2008b) who assessed whether promotinginvented spelling facilitated emergent word reading with English-speaking 5-year-olds who werenonreaders and not yet receiving any standard literacy curricula. It is important to note that thisteaching study included a comparison group that received instruction on phonological awareness,thus allowing for a direct comparison between teaching geared towards expanding inventedspelling and instruction targeting phonological awareness. Children were selected for the studyonly if they could not yet read, and they were matched across teaching conditions on phonologicalawareness, letter knowledge, and invented spelling. Children in the invented-spelling conditionwere provided with individualized feedback on their spelling attempts in the form of an alternateinvented spelling that was slightly more complex than the one produced, as motivated by theprevious work of Martins and Silva (2006). Children in the phonological awareness group received

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instruction involving matching pictures on shared sounds and segmenting words into sounds (inan Elkonin say-it and move-it task). All children were seen in small groups, withdrawn from theregular classroom, for nine sessions delivered over a 4-week period.

The carefully designed teaching study yielded several noteworthy results. Foremost, the in-vented spelling group learned to read more novel words than did the other children at posttest.Second, the invented-spelling and the phonological-awareness children made similar gains inphonological awareness. Thus, not only was the teaching methodology for invented spellingfound to be effective for promoting growth in invented spelling, but also for promoting phono-logical awareness and early reading. An important conclusion from these results is that inventedspelling facilitated learning to read directly, beyond its connection to phonological awareness.That is, if the facilitative effects of invented spelling were attributable solely to increases inphonological awareness, both groups of children would have had equivalent posttest readingperformance. This was not the case, thus providing evidence that promoting invented spellingdoes more than just increase phonological awareness. This pattern of findings was also replicatedin a sample of children at risk of reading difficulties because of their low phoneme awareness(Senechal, Ouellette, Pagan, & Lever, 2012).

Although the Ouellette and Senechal (2008b) findings with nonreaders and those from Senechalet al. (2012) with at-risk children are important in establishing a causal link between inventedspelling and early reading, they are limited from an educational point of view. Teachers wouldwant to know whether such interventions would prove beneficial with their regular, heteroge-neous kindergarten classrooms, where some children already exhibit emerging reading behaviors.Further, although it was important in the original research to isolate the effects of the teachingprograms under study by including only children who were not receiving structured literacy cur-ricula, it is of interest now to consider whether similar beneficial outcomes are evident for childrenwho are in literacy-rich classrooms and already receiving phonological awareness instruction.That is, will the invented spelling teaching program provide benefits beyond what is being fos-tered already in a literacy-rich classroom? Last, the prior research teaching programs were onlyoffered over a 4-week period and no longer term effects of the programs were evaluated beyondthe immediate posttests. These shortcomings are all addressed in the teaching study presentedhere.

The Present Study

In the present research, we sought to examine whether a teaching program that guided children’sinvented spelling within a Vygotskian framework would facilitate emergent reading skills ofchildren attending a structured kindergarten curriculum that was already rich in literacy expo-sure and teaching. Following the design of Ouellette and Senechal (2008b), a comparison groupreceived phonological awareness instruction so to evaluate whether any invented spelling advan-tage would be separate from, or subsumed by, developing phonological awareness skills. Thisprovides a more stringent and ethical comparison than does a do-nothing control condition. Bothgroups of children also received teaching in alphabet knowledge and were exposed to the samewords. Teaching was expanded in duration over previous studies, encompassing 16 sessions overan 8-week period. Following the instructional component, children were immediately tested onphonological awareness and invented spelling. It is important to note that a learn-to-read taskwas administered to test the hypothesis that invented spelling would facilitate learning to read

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more so than phonological awareness instruction. Last, a delayed posttest for literacy skills wasadministered early in Grade 1 to test for lasting effects of the intervention.

METHOD

Participants

A sample of 44 English-speaking children attending kindergarten in three schools located ineastern Canada participated. These schools were chosen because they are within a school districtthat has an intensive early balanced literacy curriculum including guided and shared reading,phonological awareness, and direct phonics teaching; they were also within geographical prox-imity to the first author and the principals, teachers, and parents had consented to participate inthis project. Interviews with the teachers revealed that invented spelling was not part of any pro-gram or curricula being followed. Because of their geographical school boundaries, the schoolsserved families from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, as evidenced by the range of parentaleducation level: 3% of responding parents had completed less than high school, 28% high school,43% college, and 28% had attended university. The breakdown of parental education was similaracross schools. There were two kindergarten classrooms participating in each school, with approx-imately equal number of students participating in each class (there were 15, 12, and 17 studentsparticipating in total from the three schools). Preliminary analysis revealed equivalent studentperformance across the schools and participating classrooms, with each classroom containingchildren of varying language and literacy skills.

Children were initially assessed on a battery of language and literacy measures and thenrandomly assigned with a random number generator to one of two teaching conditions with theconstraint that there be an equal number of children assigned to each condition from withina classroom, thus counterbalancing classroom/teacher with teaching condition to strengthenexternal validity. Two students moved shortly after the start of the study, and two others wereidentified as clear multivariate outliers on scatter plots of pretested measures. These four studentswere thus excluded from the study, leaving a final sample of 20 children in each of the twointervention conditions, with a mean age of 5;9 (SD = 4 months) at the onset. There were 11boys in the invented spelling condition and 10 boys in the phonological awareness condition.

Procedure

The study was conducted in four phases. First, children were pretested before the midway pointof their kindergarten year. Second, the children then participated in the 8-week teaching program.Third, children were immediately posttested after the end of the teaching program; and fourth,children received a delayed posttest, administered early in Grade 1. All testing was conductedindividually and took two sessions for each testing time. To eliminate possible bias, testers wereblind to teaching-condition assignment.

Description of the Teaching Conditions

Children were seen in small groups for 16 teaching sessions over an 8-week period. The inter-ventions started in the second half of the kindergarten year and consisted of two 20-min sessions

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a week. Interventions were delivered to groups of 3 to 5 children, dependent upon the logisticsof the number of participants per class and school (intervention conditions were counterbalancedacross classrooms/teachers). Two instructors were trained by the first author and a teacher with13 years of classroom experience, and were counterbalanced across conditions (i.e., each in-structor taught an equal number of each teaching condition). All groups received letter-soundinstruction at the beginning of each session in which letter names and sounds were taught with arhythmic chant and clapping. This activity occurred at the start of each group session, with fiveletter-sounds practiced each session and recycled in the same order throughout the duration ofthe instructional program. In all, 14 letter-sound associations were taught this way, in additionto the regular alphabet instruction received within the classrooms. To ensure that children hadreceived some instruction on the letters used in the stimuli, all teaching words were composedfrom this set of 14 letters, as were all regular words in the spelling and reading assessments. Theletters and teaching words are in the Appendix and are identical to those used in Senechal et al.(2012).

Invented spelling condition

Children in this condition were taught to increase the sophistication of their naturally occurringinvented spellings following the procedure outlined in Ouellette and Senechal (2008b), and asdescribed next. The words were presented, one at a time, in both picture form and orally by theinstructor. Each word was spoken out loud by the instructor at a normal speech rate, and thenrepeated in a stretched manner with exaggerated articulation (but with no pausing between thephonemes). The word was said a third time at a normal speech rate, and the children were askedto repeat the word out loud in unison. Last, the word was said a fourth time and the children wereinstructed to print the word in a provided notebook. Children were repeatedly encouraged to dotheir best and were told that their spellings did not have to be the same as an adult might write oreven be the same as the spellings produced by the other children in their group.

After each spelling attempt, the instructor quickly offered individually tailored feedback toeach child in which their invented spelling was contrasted with an instructor-generated inventedspelling representative of a minimal increase in sophistication. This feedback was provided in thecontext of praising the child’s invented spelling and then showing another way to write the word;the corrected form typically contained one additional correct letter following the developmentalprogression outlined earlier, as described by Gentry and Gillet (1993). The guidelines followedby the instructors are summarized in the Appendix. From the fifth session onward, feedback alsoincluded the removal of any unnecessary letters from the child’s spelling and a discussion of howmany sounds were in the word. By providing feedback and a model slightly more sophisticatedthan the child’s own production (e.g., showing LD to the child who spells LADY as L; thenshowing LAD if they spell LADY as LD, and then finally showing LADY if they produce LAD), alearning opportunity is created within a child’s zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1962).The feedback can also clearly be described as scaffolding in so far as the instructor is providingexpert support (Tudge & Scrimsher, 2003); yet in line with a Vygotskian approach to teaching,the interaction between student and instructor is a reciprocal, exploratory process, meant to guidethe student to a more advanced level (see Scrimsher & Tudge, 2003). After the individualizedfeedback, the procedure was repeated using the same word. Within each session, five words werespelled (twice each); these words were repeated for two consecutive sessions. In all, 40 words

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were practiced over the intervention and are listed in the Appendix. Note that these words wereall composed from the limited letter set taught to all participants and were chosen to include avariety of vowel and syllable patterns, including long and short vowels as well as diphthongs. Asinvented spelling involves learning both sound analysis and word-specific visual (letter) patterns,the word lists also contains vowel-teams, doubled consonants, and two-syllable words. Feedbackvaried according to word complexity; again, see the Appendix for a detailed progression.

Phonological awareness condition

This group was taught to analyze words into smaller segments with tasks that are typical ofphonological awareness curricula and that have well-documented effectiveness (e.g., see Ehriet al., 2001; Ouellette & Senechal, 2008a). Children in this condition were first taught to matchpictures based on shared initial and final sounds, using the first 10 of the 40 practice words, inthe same order and at the same frequency as in the invented spelling condition (i.e., five wordsper session, each repeated twice and used for two consecutive sessions). Each child was given asheet with the practice item pictured on the left with three other pictured items presented in thesame row. All practice items were named by the instructor in the same fashion as for the inventedspelling condition: one time at a normal speech rate, one time with stretched speech, and twomore times at a normal rate with the children repeating the word out loud in unison once. Thus,the frequency and manner of exposure to the stimuli was carefully controlled across conditions.For each word, the children were asked to circle the picture that started or ended the same asthe practice item. The instructor provided individually tailored corrective feedback, modeling thecorrect answer as necessary. Each trial was then repeated.

For the final 30 words (i.e., from the fifth session on), the children were taught a phonemicsegmenting task based on Elkonin’s (1973) original say-it and move-it activity as described byOuellette and Senechal (2008b). In this task, children stamp a marker, once for each phonemein a word, into squares below a picture of that word. Again, the instructor said each word fourtimes as before, and the procedure was modelled as necessary. For each word, the children wereasked to repeat the word out loud in unison and to make the appropriate number of stamps asthey did so. Individually tailored feedback was given involving a discussion of how many soundswere in the word (as in the invented spelling condition) and the trial repeated. Once more, thesame words were used in the same order and at the same frequency as with the other teachingcondition.

Measures (and Testing Time)

Alphabet knowledge (pretest and immediate posttest)

Children were presented with index cards containing each letter or digraphs in uppercase andlowercase in 72-point font. All letters except X and Q were included as well as three digraphs(ch, sh, th) for a maximum score of 27. Cards were presented in a fixed random order and thechildren were asked to give the sound the letters made (long or short vowel sounds were acceptedas correct). Interitem reliability for this task was strong (α = .91).

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Phonological awareness (pretest, immediate, and delayed posttest)

Phonological awareness was assessed with three subtests of the Comprehensive Test of Phono-logical Processing (1999). In the sound matching subtest, children were (a) shown four picturesthat were named by the experimenter on each trial and (b) asked to indicate which picture eitherstarted the same or ended the same as the first. In the elision subtest, children listened to a spokenword, and were required to say what was left from it once a sound spoken by the experimenter wasdeleted (e.g., “Say ‘farm’ without saying /f/”). In the blending words subtest, children listenedto an audio-recorded presentation of words spoken in individual phonemes and were asked tosay the word formed by the individual sounds. Each subtest consists of 20 items with testingstopped following three consecutive errors. The reported interitem reliability of these subtestsare excellent at this age level (α = .88–.93). Following the recommended scoring procedureof the test manual, subtest scores were combined into a phonological awareness composite forinferential testing.

Invented spelling (pretest, immediate, and delayed posttest)

Spelling sophistication was assessed using a spelling scoring system adapted from Tangeland Blachman (1992) as described in Ouellette and Senechal (2008b), in which each item wasscored on a 7-point scale. For each item spoken by the experimenter, a corresponding picturewas also shown to avoid confounds with memory. Children were encouraged to try their best tospell the words. Ten words were dictated for pretesting and immediate posttesting, three of whichwere original words used by Tangel and Blachman (1992), plus seven additional words chosen torepresent a variety of articulatory and syllabic features. Of the 10 words, 5 were words childrenencountered in their intervention conditions. For the delayed posttesting, six words were dictatedthat all had consistent phonology to orthography mappings and represented a range of consonantclusters and vowel patterns (taken from Weeks, Castles, & Davies, 2006). The word lists are inthe Appendix. Following previous research (Ouellette & Senechal, 2008a; Treiman & Bourassa,2000) interrater reliability was assessed by having two raters score all spelling attempts. The per-cent agreement between the two raters on all 400 items (40 children × 10 words) from the pretestwas 84.6% and the Pearson correlation between the total score given to each child by the tworaters was strong at r = .97. For all assessment times, each individual disagreement was reviewedby the raters and discussed until a consensus final score was reached, thus maximizing reliability.

Conventional spelling (delayed posttest only)

For delayed posttesting, the 6 dictated words used in the invented spelling task were rescoredfor conventional spelling. On this spelling task, one point was given for every item spelledcorrectly. Interitem reliability was very good (α = .80).

Word reading (pretest and delayed posttest)

We used 10 words to assess word reading at pretesting. Of the 10 words, 5 were high-frequencyirregularly spelled sight words taken from lists provided by Fry, Kress, and Fountoukidis (2000)and Fountas and Pinnell (1996), and five were decodable words. Of these 10 words, 5 were used inthe teaching conditions. For delayed posttesting, five additional decodable words were added that

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were not used in the interventions. Words were presented one at a time in a fixed-random order, onseparate index cards in 48-point font. One point was given for every item read correctly. The wordlists are in the Appendix. The interitem reliability was very good (α = .84). This experimentalmeasure was judged to be a more sensitive measure of kindergarten word reading because of thenumber of easier words and inclusion of both high frequency sight words and simple decodableitems (the classroom curricula included phonics and sight word exposure), as compared with astandardized test such as the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (Woodcock, 1998) thatinclude few items for kindergarten level word reading.

Oral vocabulary (pretest only)

Children’s receptive vocabulary was assessed with the Peabody Picture VocabularyTest–Fourth Edition (Dunn & Dunn, 2007) in which children are required to point to one offour pictures that matches a word spoken by the examiner. There are 228 items in all, with testspecified ceiling rules followed for discontinuation of testing. The reported interitem reliabilityof this test is excellent at α = .97.

Learn-to-read task (immediate posttest only)

To test the central hypothesis that invented spelling might facilitate learning to read, childrenwere taught to read ten words in a learning task modeled after one described by Ehri and Wilce(1987) and used by Ouellette and Senechal (2008b). The words selected were constrained toinclude a selection of the 14 letters taught to all participating children; these words were notused in the teaching programs nor were they part of any other pretest measure. Five started withB and five with P to ensure that the children had to attend to all letters in the words. The wordlist is in the Appendix, and is comprised of words of varying difficulty, with the inclusion of aconsonant blend and a bisyllabic word; This small set of words allowed for the children’s learningproficiency to be evaluated over a range of syllable types and complexity. Children were told thatthey were going to learn to read some words and that the words contained the letters that theyhad practiced in their groups. Each word was shown to the child and sounded out and blendedby the instructor as she ran her finger under the word. A sentence was then read that provided ameaningful context for the word. The child was then asked to say the word while running theirfinger under it. This was repeated for all 10 words. A recall trial was then completed in whicheach word was shown individually and the child was asked to read it; a correct reading was givena score of 1, an incorrect reading a score of 0. If incorrect, the answer was given and the child wasasked to repeat it while again running their finger under the word. Trials were repeated with theword order varied randomly, until all ten words were read correctly or to a maximum of five trials.The dependent variable is how many words were read correctly on each trial, thus providing ameasure of learning to read.

RESULTS

Children’s Performance Before the Intervention

Preliminary analyses were conducted to confirm that the children in the two teaching conditionswere comparable before the start of the programs. The descriptive statistics for early literacy

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TABLE 1Pretest Performance as a Function of Teaching Condition

Spell (n = 20)Phonological awareness

(n = 20)

Measure Maximum M SD M SD

Invented spelling 60 37.95 9.45 36.00 9.06Phonological awareness

Sound matching 20 7.30 2.74 6.90 3.80Elision 20 4.90 2.27 4.30 2.66Blending 20 7.05 2.01 7.75 2.17

Letter-sounds 27 23.70 2.64 23.75 3.32Word reading 10 3.65 2.20 3.45 2.34Oral vocabulary 110.65 9.09 107.85 12.68

Note. For oral vocabulary, Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test–Fourth Edition standard score with test mean = 100.

measures and oral vocabulary are presented in Table 1. The means for all measures reflectedperformance at or above age-expected levels, and these children were emergent readers becausethey could read, on average, three or four words. The magnitude of the standard deviations,however, indicated that there were wide-ranging language and literacy skills in the sample, asexpected within a typical kindergarten classroom. It is important to note that multivariate analysisof variance failed to reveal any significant difference between the conditions (Wilks’ lambda =.851, F < 1). Therefore, children in the two conditions were comparable coming into teachingconditions.

Children’s Performance Immediately After the Intervention

The primary research question of the present study is whether guiding children’s invented spellingwould both improve invented spelling sophistication and facilitate children’s entry into reading.We expected that children in the invented-spelling condition would learn to read more words thanwould the other children. As depicted in Figure 1, the invented-spelling children outperformed

FIGURE 1 Performance on the learn-to-read task immediately after completion of the teaching programs.

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the phonological awareness children on each of the five trials of the learn-to-read task. This wasconfirmed through a repeated measures analysis, that revealed a statistically significant between-group difference on the series of trials as a set, F(1, 38) = 4.32, p = .044, Cohen’s d = .66.There was also a main effect of trial showing that children in the two conditions were learningwords across trials, F(4, 152) = 61.85, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.34. Last, there was no significantinteraction between group and trial, F(4, 152) < 1. The main effect of trial (with a large effectsize) showed that both groups of children were learning to read words, but the condition maineffect (medium-large effect size) supports the notion that promoting invented spelling can easechildren’s entry into learning how to read.

We also expected that children in the invented spelling condition would demonstrate moregrowth in the sophistication of their spelling attempts than would be evidenced within thephonological awareness condition. In comparing invented spelling scores across Tables 1 and2, growth appears evident for both teaching conditions. This growth over time as well as effectsof learning condition were evaluated through a 2 (teaching condition: invented spelling vs.phonological awareness) × 2 (testing time: pretest vs. posttest) analyses of variance with repeatedmeasures on the second factor. There were statistically significant effects of time, F(1, 38) =110.12, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.02; condition, F(1, 38) = 2.96, p = .047, Cohen’s d = .54; anda Time × Condition interaction, F(1, 38) = 7.70, p = .009, Cohen’s d = .88. Although there wasgrowth in invented spelling across both conditions, the large effect size of the interaction reflectssignificantly more growth for children who received invented-spelling as compared with thosewho received phonological awareness instruction.

The present research was also designed to address whether invented spelling and phonologicalawareness instruction would have equivalent outcomes for alphabetic knowledge and phonolog-ical awareness growth. This was accomplished by conducting for each measure, a 2 (teachingcondition: invented spelling vs. phonological awareness) × 2 (testing time: pretest vs. posttest)analyses of variance with repeated measures on the second factor. For letter knowledge, there wasa significant main effect of time, F(1, 38) = 12.28, p = .001, Cohen’s d = .47, confirming the ex-pectation that children would benefit from the alphabetic teaching that was included in both condi-tions. As expected there were no effects of condition or any interaction (Fs < 1). We also expectedthat instruction on invented spelling would promote phonological awareness based on previousresearch findings (Martins & Silva, 2006; Ouellette & Senechal, 2008a; Senechal et al., 2012).

TABLE 2Immediate Posttest Performance as a Function of Teaching Condition

Spell (n = 20)Phonological

awareness (n = 20)


Invented spelling 60 48.95 4.24 42.40 9.08Phonological awareness


Letter-sounds 27 25.50 1.85 24.40 2.46

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TABLE 3Grade 1 Posttest Performance as a Function of Teaching Condition

Spell (n = 17)Phonological

awareness (n = 19)


Invented spelling 36 29.00 5.26 23.84 8.01Conventional spelling 6 2.71 1.96 1.68 1.67Phonological awareness


Word reading 15 8.12 2.87 7.11 3.94

In accord with this expectation, there was a statistically significant main effect of time forphonological awareness, F(1, 38) = 34.237, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 1.16, with no effects ofteaching condition or any interactions (Fs < 1). Thus, children in both teaching conditionsshowed significant growth in phonological awareness over the duration of our teaching study(Table 2).

Performance in Grade 1

The descriptive statistics for the literacy and phonological awareness measures taken in Grade1 are presented in Table 3. While it may seem optimistic to expect lasting differences fromour brief teaching program, children who received the invented spelling teaching maintainedtheir advantage for invented spelling compared with the children who received phonologicalawareness instruction, F(1, 34) = 5.08, p < .031, Cohen’s d = .76. Further, as evidenced inTable 3, children in the invented spelling condition did score higher, on average, for every literacymeasure; because of limited power, however, multivariate analysis of variance failed to revealany statistically significant difference between the conditions on these literacy measures (Wilks’lambda = .905, F = 1.12, p = .355).

DISCUSSION

Invented spelling is a developmental process that reflects a young child’s present understandingof how words are represented in print. As such, it is well positioned for use within a Vygotskianapproach to teaching where children can be guided to the level of spelling sophistication justbeyond their present one. As originally highlighted by Chomsky (1971) and Invernizzi et al.(1994), this potential use of invented spelling as a teaching tool has been largely overlooked. Thepresent findings add to a small but growing body of research that show the effectiveness of usingguided invented spelling to promote early literacy, and extend previous research by demonstratingthe beneficial effects of guiding invented spelling hold even for children receiving a literacy richschool experience and already learning to read.

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In the present teaching study, invented spelling practice with scaffolding and feedback resultedin superior group performance in learning to read simple words relative to additional instructionon phonological awareness. In accord with Frith (1985), invented spelling provides childrenwith valuable insight into the alphabetic code that underlies written language. In analyzing thespoken words and mapping what is heard into print, children actively integrate phonologicaland orthographic representations and knowledge. With scaffolding and feedback, children’sinternal representations become refined and interconnected across the visual and auditory domains(Perfetti & Hart, 2002; Share, 1995). It is this analytic stance as well as the refinement andintegration of representations that helps in learning to read. Invented spelling is also by definitionchild-directed and exploratory; child directed instruction like that implemented in the presentstudy, together with higher levels of engagement and teaching tailored to be within a child’s zoneof proximal development, can all contribute to improved learning (e.g., Martins & Silva, 2006;Scrimsher & Tudge, 2003; Turner, 1995; Vygotsky, 1962).

The finding that invented spelling practice promoted phonological awareness just as much asdirect phonological awareness instruction is consistent with recent research employing similarmethods (e.g., Silva & Martins, 2003; Sirois, Boisclair, & Giasson, 2008). This finding is alsoimportant theoretically because it provides evidence that the advantage in learning to read foundfor the invented spelling condition was not due to increased phonological awareness alone. Assuch, the present research conducted with a representative sample of children extends the findingsof Ouellette & Senechal (2008b) with nonreaders as well as those of Senechal et al. (2012) withat-risk children.

In the present research, another novel and important finding was that children who received theinvented spelling instruction maintained their advantage until the beginning of Grade 1. Moreover,these children’s conventional spelling in Grade 1 was similar (even slightly superior) to that ofchildren in the phonological awareness teaching condition. This suggests that invented spelling,with appropriate feedback, does not impede the learning of proper conventional spellings; infact, it may well facilitate this learning. However, the reading advantage did not appear to bemaintained over time. This might have been too much to expect given that the children receivedonly 16 brief sessions over a 2-month period. Integrating this type of instructional program withinthe classroom on a consistent basis might bring about longer lasting benefits in terms of readingacquisition and remains an area for future classroom studies.

Implications for Teaching

Invented spelling with guidance provides kindergarten teachers with an additional tool to promoteearly literacy. The present findings are important because the intervention was implementedwith unselected children from regular classrooms. Importantly, the kindergarten teachers inthose classrooms were already using an intensive early literacy curriculum that included sharedreading, phonological awareness activities, and direct phonics teaching. Still, our invented spellinginstruction improved children’s literacy outcomes above and beyond the literacy-rich teachingthey were already receiving. The present findings thus provide direct empirical evidence for theaddition of this type of Vygotskian guided invented spelling into the classroom. Rather thanregarding invented spelling as incorrect in a conventional sense, teachers have the opportunity tocapitalize on a learning opportunity by scaffolding and providing feedback within a child’s zoneof proximal development.

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It should be noted that in this study (as well as in previous research), invented spelling is usedto move a child gradually toward conventional spelling. Although incorrect productions are notmarked as “wrong,” they are also not reinforced as “correct”; rather, each child’s spelling attemptsare used as a means of providing developmentally appropriate instruction. While this may beunfamiliar to some teachers, we have found the instructional process to be easily learned withina few hours through professional development style training. Just as teacher training regardingphonological awareness has been shown to result in changed classroom practices and improvedliteracy outcomes (McCutchen et al., 2002), teacher training on invented spelling developmentand feedback should not be seen as an insurmountable challenge.

The present finding that promoting invented spelling resulted in growth in phonologicalawareness and an advantage in learning to read is in accord with recent research that has foundspelling practice/teaching to transfer to reading (Ouellette, 2010), even more so than readingpractice may transfer to spelling performance (Conrad, 2008). Contrast this with the use of wordwalls or other means that teachers typically expose kindergarten students to printed words with,in which the visual word is presented long before that word may be given to a student to spell.The growing literature on invented and conventional spelling practice early in literacy teachingsuggests that there may be benefits of having children attempt to spell words before having visualexposure to them in reading instruction. This would elicit invented spelling by providing theopportunity for a child to analyze a word’s sound structure and apply their growing knowledgeof the alphabet. With scaffolding and Vygotskian oriented feedback, the child can be lead tothe correct spelling in a developmentally appropriate fashion. In theory, this may lead to higherquality and more integrated internal representations used in reading (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Theempirical evidence suggests that through this process, the child can gain an advantage when itcomes to learning to spell and read. Thus, a natural extension of this research is to not onlyincorporate invented spelling in the classroom but also use this teaching methodology as a way ofintroducing children to words that may be part of reading curricula or benchmarks. In this way,invented spelling is seen as an integral part of reading instruction, as opposed to traditional viewsthat may separate reading and spelling in teaching (Treiman, 1993).

Limitations and Areas for Future Research

The results of the present study add to the growing body of literature establishing invented spellingas an appropriate and important instructional area in literacy acquisition. The present results,however, are based on a modest sample size from one geographical location, which may causesome concern for the generalizability of the findings. In this respect, the present study is amendableto larger sample, naturalistic studies to move the field forward. It should be noted, however, thatthe research design of the present study maximizes ecological validity (within the constraintsimposed by the sample) in that children came from classrooms with a rich, balanced literacycurriculum and were not selected to meet any unrepresentative characteristic (e.g., they did nothave to be nonreaders). Further, the classrooms and teachers participating were counterbalancedacross conditions, strengthening external validity. Last, the medium to large effect sizes reportedfor the main findings warrant mention; with the decreased statistical power of a smaller sample,effect sizes of this magnitude lend confidence to the overall validity of the findings.

Another area that warrants mention is the number of inferential tests conducted on what isadmittedly a relatively small dataset. To simplify interpretation, we have reported actual p-values

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in the Results section, along with Cohen’s effect size indices, to allow the reader to evaluate thestrength of the findings. It is important, especially in educational research, to balance Type I andType II error concerns; in this respect, it should be noted that the statistical significance of themain findings do stand up to stepwise adjustments to error rates (Hochberg, 1988; Holm, 1976),based on three families (Shaffer, 1995) of hypothesis testing (pretesting, immediate posttesting;Grade 1 follow-up testing).

The present study provides an important piece to the research literature, showing beneficialeffects of this type of teaching for children already receiving a literacy rich curriculum. As alludedto earlier, the next step would be a larger scale implementation study to replicate the present studywith a larger sample while testing the efficacy of this teaching as part of the regular classroomprogram. Further, given the growing evidence that incorporating invented spelling within thistype of teaching approach yields an advantage in learning to read early in literacy acquisition,it may also be queried whether this approach would lend itself to the remediation of readingdifficulties in older students. Similarly, the teaching methodology incorporated in the presentstudy may be explored with English-as-a-second language students; the exploratory nature maywell facilitate literacy skill acquisition in English while also providing important vocabularyexposure. Last, the present study is suggestive of benefits of a write-first approach in literacyinstruction, where students analyze spoken words and attempt to represent them in print beforehaving visual exposure to them. This contention could be tested directly by evaluating whetherlearning through word exposure (e.g., word walls) is improved if the words are first introducedin an invented spelling task.

Conclusion

The research reported here both validated the teaching methodology of improving inventedspelling and confirmed that facilitating invented spelling within a Vygotskian teaching approachcan bring about benefits in learning to read and spell, and these benefits go beyond the expansionof alphabetic knowledge and phonological awareness. It is important to note that it extended totypically developing children findings obtained with nonreaders (Ouellette & Senechal, 2008b)or at-risk children (Senechal et al., 2012), and showed potential lasting benefits into Grade 1. Tocreate invented spellings, children must translate a spoken word into printed letters, in essenceforging a connection between oral and written language. In doing so, they are faced with the task ofbreaking down the speech stream to map the segmented units onto letters, integrating knowledgeacross auditory and visual domains. This largely child-directed, exploratory process is well suitedto incorporate within a Vygotskian approach to teaching to enhance phonological awareness andpromote the integration of phonological and orthographic representations, a process centralin literacy acquisition. With scaffolding and developmentally appropriate feedback, inventedspelling provides a milieu for children to adopt an analytic stance to the relation between orallanguage and written symbols that can facilitate their entry into reading and spelling.

AUTHOR NOTES

Gene Ouellette is an associate professor of Psychology and Department Head at Mount AllisonUniversity, Canada. He holds a PhD in Psychology and a MSc in Communication Disorders(SLP); research interests include invented spelling, the role of oral vocabulary knowledge in

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reading, the acquisition of orthographic representations, as well as adult literacy. MoniqueSenechal is a professor of Psychology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. She holds a PhDin Developmental Psychology and is interested in understanding how children learn languageand literacy from events that occur naturally in their lives; other research interests involveunderstanding the basic mechanisms that underlie the acquisition of reading and writing. AllysonHaley is currently pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of New Brunswick, Canada,having completed her Masters in Psychology at the University of York, UK. She is interested inexploring connections between oral and written language and in the development and evaluationof literacy and language curricula.

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APPENDIX

Letters Taught in the Interventions:

A, B, D, E, I, L, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, Y.

Words Used in the Interventions:

Sessions 1 and 2 ape eel on in noSessions 3 and 4 day see pie add toeSessions 5 and 6 rod lap pen bib sunSessions 7 and 8 sad rip nut rat netSessions 9 and 10 soap nail line pole sealSessions 11 and 12 rain toad date rope biteSessions 13 and 14 lady ladder apple puppy pandaSessions 15 and 16 nest spider star bird snail

Invented Spelling Assessment (with words in italics used in the interventions)Pretest and immediate posttest: lap, sick, elephant, pretty, train, day, boot, no, lady, apeDelayed posttest: craft, fish, spring, ring, rust, wing

Word Reading Assessment (with words in italics used in the interventions)Pretest: are, to, here, come, no, lady, lap, day, ape, haveDelayed posttest: pretest words plus these five words: lip, so, ate, bay, bony

Learn-to-Read Taskbed, bee, bend, bone, baby, pin, pie, pond, peel, pony

Invented Spelling Feedback Guidelines for Instructors

For 2-sound words:1. Is the word conventionally correct?If yes, go to next trial.If no, go to next step.

2. Is the first sound represented correctly?If no, replace the first letter with the correct one. Go to next trial.If yes, go to next step.

3. Is the final sound represented correctly?If no, replace the final letter with the correct one. Note in some cases this may result in the conventionallycorrect word. Go to next trial.If yes but word not conventionally correct, go to next step.

4. Are both sounds of the word represented phonetically, but with extra letters present?If yes, remove the extra letters. Note in some cases this may result in the conventionally correct word. Goto next trial.If no, go to next step.

5. Are both sounds represented phonetically and no additional letters present?If yes, show the conventionally correct spelling (if the invented spelling is still not correct).

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For 3-sound words: Note that an additional step is inserted to deal with the medial sound (following step 3above):4. Is the medial vowel(s) represented correctly?If no, insert the correct vowel(s). Note in some cases this may result in the conventionally correct word. Goto next trial.If yes, go to next step.

5. Are all sounds represented phonetically?If yes, show the conventionally correct spelling (if the invented spelling is still not correct).

Note that from the fifth session on, feedback was also given about the number of sounds in the word andextra letters removed for all attempts (i.e., in addition to the correction at the appropriate step).Note that for the more complex final 10 words, these steps were expanded to reflect the additional elementspresent (e.g., consonant blends, r-digraphs).

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Documents

Guiding Children's Invented Spellings: A Gateway Into Literacy Learning