The influence of teachers’ knowledge and teaching practice on outcomes for beginning readers : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education at Massey University, Manawatū Campus, New Zealand

New Zealand has a problem with reading achievement, in spite of ongoing efforts to address the issue. The current study selected to investigate the influence of teachers’ knowledge and teaching practice in teaching beginning reading. The study was a two-phase, mixed methods, explanatory sequential design, involving 30 teachers from 12 urban, state schools located in New Zealand’s lower North Island. Teachers participated in professional learning and development (PLD) workshops focused on teacher knowledge and explicit teaching practice for beginning readers. The study used data from 109 New Entrant children from the PLD classrooms and from a non-PLD comparison group of 61 new entrant children. The first phase of the study involved obtaining and analysing data about teachers’ linguistic knowledge, self-confidence for teaching literacy, teaching practice, and reading prompts. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and t-tests. The findings showed that teachers’ knowledge of linguistic constructs and self-confidence in teaching the code component of reading increased significantly. Observations showed a significant change in teaching practice, from implicit teaching to explicit teaching. Teachers’ prompts changed significantly to using code-cue prompts. For some teachers, teaching practice remained implicit and prompts remained context-based, regardless of an increase in their teacher knowledge. The second phase of the study involved interviews with four teachers to identify barriers for teachers in changing to explicit teaching. Student reading skills were measured and data analysed using a series of MANOVAs and ANOVAs to identify any differences between the implementation and comparison groups. The student data showed significantly better outcomes for the implementation students, with a notable positive difference for students from schools located in lower socio-economic neighbourhoods. Findings suggest that when teachers are equipped with knowledge and practice to teach the code component explicitly to beginning readers, improvement in reading outcomes is possible. Recommendations from the study include that changes are required at a policy level, in teacher training, and for teaching resources, with a particular need for increased cognisance of studies from the science of reading.

Sustaining motivation for Japanese kanji learning: Can digital games help?

Made available with permission from the publisher.Educational digital games are often presented at Technology in Language Education conferences. The games are entertaining and are backed by research detailing how games can improve the learning experience through active critical learning, learner interaction, competition, challenge, and high learner motivation. The authors, inspired by such presentations, were interested in creating digital games to mitigate problems of demotivation in a beginner Japanese kanji (non-alphabetic script) class at Auckland University of Technology but found there was no body of research on digi-tal games for learning non-alphabetic scripts. This paper contributes to filling this gap by describing the creation of three digital games for kanji learning. Difficulties were experienced during the development of the games and these are described with reference to the divide, discussed in gaming literature, between the type of digital games being showcased at conferences and the reality for teachers wishing to emulate the practice by developing their own digital games. Questionnaire responses and the game-related journal entries of three cohorts of learners were analysed, and teacher reflections on the action research project were used to answer the questions “Should we be leaving this field to the experts?” and “Other than high-end multi-level curriculum-centred digital games, are there different gaming scenarios worth exploring?

Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture

This open access volume reveals the hidden power of the script we read in and how it shapes and drives our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures. Expanding on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (i.e., the idea that language affects the way we think), this volume proposes the “Script Relativity Hypothesis” (i.e., the idea that the script in which we read affects the way we think) by offering a unique perspective on the effect of script (alphabets, morphosyllabaries, or multi-scripts) on our attention, perception, and problem-solving. Once we become literate, fundamental changes occur in our brain circuitry to accommodate the new demand for resources. The powerful effects of literacy have been demonstrated by research on literate versus illiterate individuals, as well as cross-scriptal transfer, indicating that literate brain networks function differently, depending on the script being read. This book identifies the locus of differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, and between the East and the West, as the neural underpinnings of literacy. To support the “Script Relativity Hypothesis”, it reviews a vast corpus of empirical studies, including anthropological accounts of human civilization, social psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, applied linguistics, second language studies, and cross-cultural communication. It also discusses the impact of reading from screens in the digital age, as well as the impact of bi-script or multi-script use, which is a growing trend around the globe. As a result, our minds, ways of thinking, and cultures are now growing closer together, not farther apart. ; Examines the origin, emergence, and co-evolution of written language, the human mind, and culture within the purview of script effects Investigates how the scripts we read over time shape our cognition, mind, and thought patterns Provides a new outlook on the four representative writing systems of the world Discusses the consequences of literacy for the functioning of the min

The Impact of Text Orientation on Form Effects with Chinese, Japanese and English readers

Does visuospatial orientation influence form priming effects in parallel ways in Chinese and English? Given the differences in how orthographic symbols are presented in Chinese versus English, one might expect to find some differences in early word recognition processes and, hence, in the nature of form priming effects. According to perceptual learning accounts, form priming effects (i.e., “form” priming effects) should be influenced by text orientation (Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009). In contrast, Witzel, Qiao, and Forster’s (2011) abstract letter unit account proposes that the mechanism responsible for such effect acts at a totally abstract orthographic level (i.e., the visuospatial orientation is irrelevant to the nature of the relevant orthographic code). One goal of the present research was to determine whether or not one of these accounts could explain form priming effects in both languges. Chapter 2 (Yang, Chen, Spinelli & Lupker, 2019) expanded the debate between these positions beyond alphabetic scripts and the syllabic Kana script used by Witzel et al. (2011) to a logographic script (Chinese). I report four experiments with Chinese participants in this chapter. The experiments showed masked form priming effects with targets in four different orientations (left-to-right, top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and bottom-to-top), supporting Witzel et al.’s account. Chapter 3 (Yang, Hino, Chen, Yoshihara, Nakayama, Xue, & Lupker, in press) provided an evaluation of whether the backward priming effect obtained in Experiment 2.3 (i.e., backward primes and forward targets) is truly an orthographic effect or whether it may be either morphologically/meaning- or syllabically/phonologically-based. Five experiments, two involving phonologically-related primes and three involving meaning-related primes, produced no evidence that either of those factors contributed to the backward priming effect, implying that it truly is an orthographic effect. In Chapter 4 (Yang & Lupker, 2019), I examined whether text rotation to different degrees (e.g., 0°, 90°, and 180° rotations) modulated transposed-letter (TL) priming effects in two experiments with English participants. The sizes of the priming effects were similar for horizontal 0°, 90° rotated and 180° rotated words providing further support for abstract letter unit accounts of orthographic coding. These results support abstract letter/character unit accounts of form priming effects while failing to support perceptual learning accounts. Further, these results also indicate a language difference in that Chinese readers have more flexible (i.e., less precise) letter position coding than English readers, a fact that poses an interesting new challenge to existing orthographic coding theories

Can an Accelerated Intervention Close the School Readiness Gap for Disadvantaged Children? An Evaluation of the Effects of the LEARN Project’s Summer Pre-Primary Program on Literacy Outcomes in Northern Lao PDR

Developed against the backdrop of Sustainable Development Goal 4, as well as a global trend towards rigorous assessment of early childhood programs, this thesis answers questions about the effects of an accelerated school readiness intervention for non-Lao children in disadvantaged communities of Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Through a longitudinal, cluster randomized control trial, the study employs multi-level regression with an analytical sample of 391 children to examine the outcomes of a summer pre-primary program piloted from 2015-2018 by the Lao government with support from Plan International and Save the Children International in the Dubai-Cares funded Lao Educational Access, Research, and Networking (LEARN) Project. Research questions are investigated through a design in which the same panel of children are assessed against a control group at three intervals using the Measurement of Development and Early Learning. The thesis identifies significant associations between receiving the treatment and achieving higher gain scores on several emergent literacy tasks between baseline and midline, with effects roughly in line with similar interventions in other contexts. At the same time, the thesis finds that those effects had largely faded by endline. An interaction between treatment and ethnicity was only evident in a few instances, suggesting that the intervention may have boosted school readiness for Khmu children more by the start of grade 1 and for Hmong children more during grade 1. The thesis raises important recommendations about how to improve the fit between the ultimate objectives of accelerated interventions, the evaluations they undergo, and the needs of the broader education system. New contributions to knowledge are also found by interrogating a global assessment paradigm through a comparative linguistic lens, so that forthcoming evaluations benefit from the lessons learned based on LEARN’s attempt to fit a square peg into a unique alpha-syllabic, tonal Southeast Asian language

Anaphoric resolution of zero pronouns in Chinese in translation and reading comprehension

The primary aim of the thesis is to investigate some of the processes of reading Chinese text by means of comparing and analysing approximately 100 parallel translations of four texts from Chinese to English. The translations are answers to A Level examination questions. The focus of the investigation is interpretation of the zero pronoun, a common phenomenon in Chinese, which often requires explicitation when translated into English. The secondary aim is to show how translation gives evidence of comprehension, as shown by the variation in interpretation of zero pronouns. The thesis reviews relevant psycholinguistic research into reading, particularly reading of Chinese text. This is followed by reviews of relevant research into translation as a reading activity, and a discussion of its role in language teaching and testing.The core of the thesis is the discussion of the zero pronoun in Chinese, including discussion of anaphoric choice - the writer's decision on when to use zero in preference to an explicit anaphoric form - and of anaphoric resolution - how a reader decides what a zero pronoun refers to. Anaphoric resolution may be problematic for less experienced readers of Chinese owing to its lack of rich morphological inflection which, in other languages, provides the reader with information. Some of the key ideas on anaphoric choice and resolution are then applied to the analysis of the data in the parallel translations. It would appear that factors in Chinese texts which have an effect on comprehending zero pronouns are antecedent distance, topic persistence, abstraction, multiplicity of arguments and the meaning of the verb. Characteristics of the reader which may affect comprehension of the zero pronoun include personal schemata which may lead to elaborative inferences. On the basis of the data I suggest that mark schemes could be devised on a scalar system encompassing optimal solution, proximal solution and nonsolution, which might help to solve the problem of variability in marking translation.A by-product of the thesis, and an avenue for further research, is the apparent close relationship between idea units, clause length, punctuation breaks and antecedent distance in Chinese texts and saccade length and working memory capacity in the reader of Chinese

Script and Society

By the 13th century BC, the Syrian city of Ugarit hosted an extremely diverse range of writing practices. As well as two main scripts – alphabetic and logographic cuneiform - the site has also produced inscriptions in a wide range of scripts and languages, including Hurrian, Sumerian, Hittite, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Luwian hieroglyphs and Cypro-Minoan. This variety in script and language is accompanied by writing practices that blend influences from Mesopotamian, Anatolian and Levantine traditions together with what seem to be distinctive local innovations. Script and Society: The Social Context of Writing Practices in Late Bronze Age Ugarit explores the social and cultural context of these complex writing traditions from the perspective of writing as a social practice. It combines archaeology, epigraphy, history and anthropology to present a highly interdisciplinary exploration of social questions relating to writing at the site, including matters of gender, ethnicity, status and other forms of identity, the relationship between writing and place, and the complex relationships between inscribed and uninscribed objects. This forms a case- study for a wider discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of writing practices in the ancient world

How Should Context-Dependent Words Be Taught to Beginning Readers?

This study examined three different instructional methods for teaching beginners to read context-dependent words. Two types of context-dependent words were taught: irregular past tense verbs and function words. The words were embedded either in scrambled contexts or in meaningful sentence contexts. Three different instructional conditions to teach the words were compared. In the Meaningful Context condition, students studied the target words embedded in meaningful sentences. In the Scrambled condition, students studied target words placed in scrambled word sequences. In the Combination condition, students studied target words in both types of contexts that were alternated across learning trials. Participants were 53 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten students, ages 5 to 6 years, who qualified as beginning readers based on pretests. The two word types were read on separate training days, with two sets of posttests administered a day after each training session. Posttests included measures of sight word reading, spelling, sentence production, irregular past tense verb transformations, and syntactic awareness. It was hypothesized that instructional condition would affect the word identities that were learned. Results showed that instructional condition did not affect word reading measures during training or on any of the posttests. It was also hypothesized that function words would be easier to learn across measures. Results showed that function words were easier to read and spell, while past tense verbs were easier to embed in sentence contexts. Findings carry instructional implications for how to teach context-dependent words to beginning readers