Concept of Word

Concept of Word

Flanigan (2005)

Image courtesy of http://www.halloween.ecsd.net/MB%20Halloween.htm

Jack has trouble matching spoken words to printed words while reading a memorized poem.

Direct quotes from Flanigan (2005)

Young children lack concept of word because …

• there is no simple physical basis for isolating words in speech.

• there are usually no spaces between successive spoken words as there is in printed text.

• when we speak, we pause between phrases, not words.

• when we speak or listen to someone else, we focus on the meaning of the entire message not separate words.

• See spectrograph example.


Research Evidence• Few kindergarteners could segment speech into words

(Holden & MacGinitie, 1972). Instead of tapping the poker chip for each word of a memorized text, they combined words (The book/ is in/ the desk) for each tap.

• Young children were asked to say “yes” if what they heard was a word or “no” if it was not. They heard nonverbal sounds (a cat meowing), isolated phonemes (the /s/ in /sat/), isolated syllables (the /at/ in /sat/), short words, long words, phrases, and sentences (Downing & Oliver, 1974). All children confused syllables and phonemes with words. Younger children (under 6 and half) confused words with non-verbal sounds (like the cat’s meow), phrases, sentences.


Phonemic Awareness

• The ability to attend to and manipulate the sound structure of spoken words.

• Just as there is no physical basis for breaking sentences into words, there is no physical basis for breaking words into phonemes.

• Children hear the word /cat/ as one single pulse of sound because all three phonemes in this word are coarticulated.

• Through interactions with print, children develop full phoneme awareness.


Why Is Concept of Word Important?

• Concept of Word serves as a bridge to full phoneme segmentation ability.


A beginning reader with little to no knowledge of letter-sounds may not be able to track words in print.


• Beginning readers begin to attend to beginning letter-sounds in words.

• Using memory of the story and spaces between words, they can now match spoken to written words while fingerpoint reading.


• Supported reading activities help stabilize the concept of word in text.

• With knowledge of initial letter-sounds in words, spacing between words as anchors, the reader can now examine other parts of the word.

• After encountering the word “cat” the reader begins attending not only to the initial consonant “c” but eventually to the ending letter “t” also.


• At this second stage in Morris’ model, the reader is able to attend to the word boundaries (i.e., beginning and ending consonants) and s/he becomes increasingly adept at tracking text while fingerpoint reading.


• In the third stage of Morris’s model, as the concept of word is established, readers can now examine the internal parts of the word—the vowel.

• It is only after the beginning reader has been able to segment speech into words that s/he is able to segment words into phonemes.


• The final stage of Morris’s model entails the ability to fully segment a word into its constituent phonemes. This is the necessary foundation for an increase in sight word knowledge.

• Full phoneme segmentation ability allows complete processing of all letter-sounds in words, enabling the storage of words in memory as sight words.


Questions

• According to the model, when should I start teaching sight words with a beginning reader?

• What should I do to have the student attend to the print of a pattern book if I see that s/he is overrelying on pictures and memory of the story.

Documents

Concept of Word