The Word Nerds Project: Do Young Children Spell by Analogy?

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Context and Rationale
Literacy instruction in the United States takes place in a high-stakes accountability environment from the first day of kindergarten. Michigan has fallen to 41st on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fourth-grade reading assessment and over 50% of third-graders score less than proficient on our state literacy exams (Michigan Department of Education, 2017; www.mischooldata.org). In response to these grim statistics, Governor Rick Snyder signed legislation stating that students who are not proficient readers by third grade will be retained for an additional year of third grade, despite the research indicating that retention does not support better long-term outcomes for students. Based on the data cited above, this new policy puts half of third-grade students in Michigan at risk of retention. Given these pressing concerns, which unfortunately are not unique to Michigan, there is an overwhelming need for more research on early literacy development and effective instruction that can help children before they reach the third grade deadline.

Theoretical Frameworks and Research Questions
This study investigates the claim of Ehri’s model of sight-word development (2005) and developmental spelling theory (Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2015) that children learn new words by analogizing from known words. In theory, as children increase their orthographic knowledge and learn to read and spell increasingly complex words, they can use those words to decode and spell other, similarly-spelled words (often called orthographic neighbors). For example, a child who knows the word run would be able to read and spell bun and ran, and a child who knows the word peach would be able to read and spell the words beach and poach.

One concern raised by the teachers in this project, however, is their perception that their students are not able to consistently analogize to similarly spelled words, indicating that orthographic similarity might not be enough to support children’s attempts to analogize. Ehri’s recent work (e.g., Chambré, Ehri, & Ness, 2017), Perfetti’s lexical quality hypothesis (2007), and psychological research (see Bowers & Bowers, 2017) suggest that words are specified in memory by a combination of phonological, orthographic, and semantic coding, which implies that attaching word forms to their meanings is a critical part of word learning. Thus, it may be harder for children to analogize from familiar (dig) to more rare words with unfamiliar meanings (jig). Thus, the first research questions that the Word Nerds project set out to answer focused on children’s ability to spell using analogy:

1) Do children perform similarly on spelling words of similar orthographic complexity?
2) Do older children demonstrate a greater ability to analogize from familiar to unfamiliar spelling words than younger children? In Ehri’s model, children become able to use analogy more proficiently as their orthographic knowledge increases. Thus, we would expect third- and fourth-grade students to use analogy to support accurate spelling more often than first-grade students.

Author

• Laura Tortorelli, Michigan State University