were asked to read words such as and in order to identify those children ‘red’ ‘egg’, who recognised high-frequency words by sight, but who could not yet freely blend and segment nonsense words. Perhaps the nonsense words being assessed could have been interspersed amongst un-assessed common words of identical syllabic complexity and orthographic depth (Seymour et al., 2003). This might have helped those (few) children who, having taken one look at the nonsense words, announced that they could or would not read them because are not real It is clear “They words.” from this immediate reaction that whole-word recognition is a common way for children to interpret and blend multiple graphemes, since such children must have or engaged with the word in some way in order to be able to pronounce ‘read’ judgement upon it as being ‘not real’. This research is focused on decoding skills, not whole-word recognition, but any research that involves itself with early reading development must acknowledge that whole-word recognition is a legitimate method used by many children to read (DfES, 2007b: 194); or those words which have a words’ words; ‘tricky passing physical resemblance to the object they represent (such as ‘aeroplane’). However, methodologically, the inclusion of recognisable high-frequency words before or during the reading of the nonsense words might have served to put children at their ease, and thus perform more comfortably in the tests. This might have produced a more on the frequency diagrams. ‘bell-like’ curve Similarly, when asking children to decode the clusters it would have been useful to determine whether or not the letters that made up those clusters (dr, fl) were letters known to those children who struggled on the single-grapheme recognition section of
were asked to read words such as ‘red’ and ‘egg’, in order to identify those children who recognised high-frequency words by sight, but who could not yet freely blend and segment nonsense words. Perhaps the nonsense words being assessed could have been interspersed amongst un-assessed common words of identical syllabic complexity and orthographic depth (Seymour et al., 2003). This might have helped those (few) children who, having taken one look at the nonsense words, announced that they could or would not read them because “They are not real words.” It is clear from this immediate reaction that whole-word recognition is a common way for children to interpret and blend multiple graphemes, since such children must have ‘read’ or engaged with the word in some way in order to be able to pronounce judgement upon it as ‘not being real’. This research is focused on decoding skills, not whole-word recognition, but any research that involves itself with early reading development must acknowledge that whole-word recognition is a legitimate method used by many children to read words; ‘tricky words’ (DfES, 2007b: 194); or those words which have a passing physical resemblance to the object they represent (such as ‘aeroplane’). However, methodologically, the inclusion of recognisable high-frequency words before or during the reading of the nonsense words might have served to put children at their ease, and thus perform more comfortably in the tests. This might have produced a more ‘bell-like’ curve on the frequency diagrams. Similarly, when asking children to decode the clusters it would have been useful to determine whether or not the letters that made up those clusters (dr, fl) were letters known to those children who struggled on the single-grapheme recognition section of
AAA_EdD_-_THE_WHOLE_THING_%28post_viva%29.docx