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Young Readers' Strategic Approaches toReading Unfamiliar Words in TextJohn R. Beech aa University of Leicester , Leicester, United KingdomPublished online: 01 Jun 2010.

To cite this article: John R. Beech (2010) Young Readers' Strategic Approaches to Reading UnfamiliarWords in Text, Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 26:3, 264-284, DOI:10.1080/10573560903547502

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Individual Article

Young Readers’ Strategic Approaches toReading Unfamiliar Words in Text

JOHN R. BEECHUniversity of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

Children reported the strategies they used when identifyingunfamiliar words while reading. Study 1 compared 39 poor read-ers (M age¼ 10 years, 7 months) with 2 groups of average readers,one of the same reading age (N¼ 39; M age¼ 8 years, 5 months)and the other (N¼ 31) matched on chronological age. Study 2included 241 children aged 7 to 11 years divided into 2 agegroups. Most children reported using an explicit phonologicalstrategy when having difficulty reading, but many poorer readersdo not have alternative strategies readily available apart fromseeking help.

As children advance in terms of reading text, their rate of progress willrely partly on how easily individual words can be read. This will depend notonly on how much vocabulary they have developed but also on the nature ofthe text that they are reading. If there are too many unfamiliar words in thetext, this can potentially be an impediment for further progress in readingany text. Furthermore, if children do not have a means of dealing with thesedifficult words, it follows that sustained reading will be much more dis-rupted, fewer words will be encountered, and, in turn, reading vocabularywill not develop efficiently. The present study explored a variety of differentstrategies that children could potentially use when meeting these difficultwords when reading text. This was explored by asking children to reportin an open-ended way what strategies they use in this context and then byclassifying these responses into various categories.

It has been proposed that there is first a search process involving anattempt to read the unfamiliar word and then a monitoring process that

Address correspondence to John R. Beech, School of Psychology, University of Leicester,Henry Wellcome Building, Lancaster Road, Leicester LE1 9HN, UK. E-mail: JRB@LE.AC.UK

Reading & Writing Quarterly, 26:264–284, 2010Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1057-3569 print=1521-0693 onlineDOI: 10.1080/10573560903547502

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evaluates this attempt (Clay, 1991; Schwartz, 2005). Most of the strategiesdiscussed in this article could be considered forms of this search process.Schwartz proposed that more attention needs to be paid to the monitoringprocess. For example, young readers need to be allowed enough time whenreading aloud to make an error and notice this error independently.

Several kinds of strategies could potentially be used when unfamiliarwords are encountered. One depends on letter–sound conversion in orderto work out the sequence of sounds, blend them together, and then use thisblend to identify the word. One model of reading that incorporates theletter–sound conversion approach is the dual-coding model (Baron, 1977;Coltheart, 1978; Patterson & Morton, 1985; Rastle & Coltheart, 1999). Thismodel proposes that individual words are decoded by two parallel systems.The first involves direct access to an entry held within the mental lexiconwithout any phonological involvement. The second route requires someform of phonological processing involving the construction of a pronunci-ation based on the rules governing the connections between print andsounds. This second system would be used for reading nonwords and newunfamiliar words. Dual-route theory would predict that as long as the childhas developed phonics skills, the letter-to-sound route would provide a goodbasis for dealing with unfamiliar words. This would enable the child to con-tinue reading text. Jorm and Share (1983) proposed that most words wouldbe read by the direct visual route (depending on text difficulty), but theletter-to-sound route would be used when there is failure. It can, however,create problems if the word is irregular in spelling, as the generated pronun-ciation may be different from that of the real word. A related problem is thatseveral pronunciations may be produced, especially as word length increasesand the choices for breaking down the letter units increase. Share (1995)elaborated theoretically on Jorm and Share’s work by suggesting that theletter–sound route acts as a self-teaching mechanism. Share (1999) demon-strated experimentally, in support of the self-teaching hypothesis, thatphonological recoding of unfamiliar letter strings provides for better learningthan pure visual exposure.

A key factor here is the establishment of phonemic awareness, or theability to recognize individual phonemes within a word. There is evidence(Bradley & Bryant, 1983; Ehri, Nunes, Stahl, & Willows, 2001; Ehri, Nunes,Willows et al., 2001) to suggest that training to a reasonable level of phono-logical awareness helps the development of this ‘‘sounding out’’ strategy andsubsequent reading. It has been established (Perfetti & Roth, 1981; Stuart,Masterson, Dixon, & Quinlan, 1999) that the process of learning to read alsopromotes further development of phonemic awareness and phonics skills. Inother words, the relationship between developing phonology and readingability is bidirectional, thus highlighting the importance of developing thegrapheme–phoneme access strategy. Yet there are critics of the dual-routetheory. For instance, Metsala, Stanovich, and Brown (1998) showed in a

Strategic Approaches to Unfamiliar Words 265

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meta-analysis that there is no evidence for a predicted reduction in theregularity effect (by dual-route theory) when those with reading disabilitiesare compared with reading-matched controls.

Another strategy that could be used to identify unfamiliar wordsinvolves the use of analogy. This is another valuable skill encouraged inthe classroom that has generated much interest (Ehri & Robbins, 1992;Gaskins et al., 1988; Goswami & East, 2000; O’Shaughnessy & Swanson,2000). Bryant and Goswami (1987) supported the use of analogy as a poten-tial strategy to teach reading. Analogical coding involves identifying words bymatching part of the orthographic structure to a similarly spelled word withinthe reader’s visual lexicon. The strategy therefore assumes that the visual lexi-con already has representations of a few words. It can be a viable method ofinstruction, and reading programs have been developed (e.g., Gaskins et al.,1988) in which children tackle unknown words by looking for and pro-nouncing words (or components of them) within new unfamiliar words.Obviously, the efficacy of analogical coding does not stand up to that ofthe previously discussed phonological strategy, as it is not viable for thosebeginning readers who have not yet developed some facility in phonologyand a rudimentary visual lexicon. For instance, Ehri and Robbins (1992)found that the use of analogy depends not just on lexical knowledge but alsoon a sufficient level of development in decoding skill. However, it could be auseful complementary tactic once reading development is under way.

Readers can also use contextual information in order to deduce themeaning of a difficult word. This is a related strategy in the sense that oncelearned, the reader need not rely on extrinsic sources of support. Adams andHuggins (1985) suggested that such a tactic is limited in its usefulness, prov-ing to be helpful only if the child is close to identifying the word in question.On a more negative note, Schatz and Baldwin (1986) found that in three sep-arate experiments context did not help students infer the meaning ofunknown words. The work of Stanovich (1980, 1981, 1991) has been impor-tant in suggesting a way of considering the effects of context. More so thanbetter readers, poor readers use sentence context to help with their wordrecognition. This may seem strange; however, when it comes to using con-textual cues for the purpose of comprehension (rather than word identifi-cation), good readers are better. Good readers only appear to be worse atusing context for word recognition because they have achieved a sufficientlevel of automaticity to enable fast access to the individual word.

Another strategy would be to use a dictionary. The dictionary affordsdeveloping readers with a potentially valuable source of information aboutthe meaning or spelling of unknown words. Several skills are necessary toexploit this information, including a good knowledge of the alphabet. Ofcourse, using the dictionary for spelling purposes also requires that the userhave a reasonable level of phonemic awareness in order to decide withwhich letters to begin the search.

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The last two strategies for identifying unfamiliar words are asking forhelp and simply skipping the word. As far as seeking help is concerned,some children will have no qualms about doing this. However, seeking suchhelp may not be so easy for others. For instance, a child who has poor socialskills and is uncommunicative would find this a difficult option. A suitablyoriented environment—one that encourages such inquiries—may providesome children with access to a resource that would otherwise have beendenied. However, there is the possible danger of developing overdepen-dence. A child who is used to being supplied with the best word by an avail-able adult may not develop other self-help strategies, such as letter–soundconversion. Furthermore, children who are supplied the word without anyattempts at decoding on their part are not developing either their decodingstrategy or their sight vocabulary efficiently (Share, 1999). The final strategyis skipping a word and reading on. This approach appears not to have beengiven much attention. Presumably, the reader is reading on in the hope thatthe word is not material to understanding the gist of the passage.

The first strategy considered here was sounding out. This has receivedthe most attention in recent years. The first three strategies (sounding out,analogy, and context) and the last strategy (skipping) could be used withoutnecessarily incurring much cost in terms of time; however, using the diction-ary and asking for help could prove disruptive to the reading process. Thislist is not intended to be exhaustive; for example, reading could also involveprocessing the structural aspects of words (Lesch & Martin, 1998; Treiman &Zukowski, 1988). There are, of course, potential problems with the approachused in the present studies, of asking a child to reflect on what he or she doeswhen dealing with an unfamiliar word. For instance, the child may not besufficiently aware of their cognitive processes. These aspects will bediscussed later in the context of the findings.

Whatever the strategy or combination of strategies used to identifyunfamiliar words, it is important that children have some means of sustainingreading. There is evidence that the more practice children have at reading,the better children become. If children have an efficient strategy for decodingwords, then more text can be read, and this in turn will help to develop read-ing vocabulary. Adams and Huggins (1985) noted that vocabulary expansionis about 3,000 words a year. Similarly, Swanborn and de Glopper (1999), ana-lyzing studies on incidental vocabulary acquisition, showed that about 15%of words are learned in this way. It has been argued that vocabulary expan-sion cannot be accounted for in terms of direct teaching, such as with flash-cards, but must instead be a byproduct of reading for interest, such as inbooks and comics. Stanovich and Cunningham (1992) suggested thatexposure to print in the longer term uniquely confers other benefits, suchas helping to expand knowledge, which in turn helps other information-processing tasks. However, this reading has to be at a suitable level, as,according to Carver (1994), reading for pleasure may not necessarily improve

Strategic Approaches to Unfamiliar Words 267

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reading vocabulary if this reading is within such a restricted domain that nounknown words are met.

In order to overcome the problem of reading text with more unfamiliarwords, a child needs to have at least one workable strategy for dealing withproblem words. Some children may have several. The two studies in this arti-cle are aimed at throwing more light on what kinds of strategies are used. Inthe first study, three groups of children were selected. The group of interestwas delayed in reading development; children in this group were comparedwith normal readers of their own age and with reading-age-matched childrenwho were chronologically younger. It was expected that to compensate fortheir difficulties, the poor readers would have a different approach to identi-fying unfamiliar words than children in the other two groups. Children whoare behind in reading and who are weak in phonics skills may express apreference for not using a phonics approach with unfamiliar words, as theymay be less encouraged by the worth of such an exercise.

The second study was a comparison of two groups of children of differ-ent ages to see if there would be a shift in orientation with developingmaturity and skill. One major aspect of interest was whether the level of achild’s reading skill and phonics skill determined the strategy that he orshe reported using to identify new words. As children get older and becomemore skilled, they may develop a preference for techniques other thanphonics, which by that stage they perceive to be too slow to gain meaningfrom print.

STUDY 1

Method

PARTICIPANTS

A total of 270 children were randomly selected from 15 primary schoolswithin the county of Leicestershire, United Kingdom, for the purposes ofboth Studies 1 and 2. The only criteria for selection were age between 7years, 0 months, and 11 years, 4 months, and a reasonable spread in termsof age and gender. From this cohort a smaller sample of three groups wasselected based on reading quotient and reading age: poor readers, youngerreaders, and age-matched readers. Younger normal readers were matchedwith older normal readers in reading quotient, and the younger normal read-ers were matched with older poor readers in reading age. A reading quotientis reading age divided by chronological age multiplied by 100, with a score of100 indicating that reading age is on a par with chronological age. Matchingby reading quotient in this way ensured that the two control groups (youngerreaders and age-matched readers) were equated in reading level relativeto their chronological ages. There were 39 poor readers, 39 much younger

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readers with the same reading ability as the poor readers (i.e., youngerreaders), and 31 children of the same chronological age as the poor readersbut approximately average in reading ability (i.e., age-matched readers). Aswould be expected, the reading quotient was lower in the poor readers com-pared with the other two groups. The maximum reading quotient for thepoor readers was 88.7, whereas the minimum reading quotients for theyounger readers and the older age-equivalent group were 91.5 and 92.6,respectively. Poor readers were 15 to 50 months behind in reading age.The maximum was 9 months behind for the two other groups. Table 1 showsthe main characteristics of these three groups. There were no significant dif-ferences between the groups on Raven’s Progressive Coloured Matrices,which served as a measure of nonverbal IQ.

MATERIALS

The following tests were given individually (except where stated).

British Ability Scales Reading Test (Elliot, 1983). This test has 90 wordsthat are initially short and regularly spelled but gradually become longer andmore irregular as the test progresses. The child reads each word aloud.Internal reliability is .98.

Children’s spelling test. This test examines skill at spelling words. Itrequires the completion of 50 partially spelled words, for instance ‘‘n__ise(din).’’ The first eight words contain pictures as clues along with the partialword. A proportion of the rest have clue words next to them. The text of

TABLE 1 Means (SD) of Poor Readers Relative to the Two Control Groups for Variables ofInterest: Study 1

Measure

Poor readers Younger readersAge-matched

readers

M SD M SD M SD

Age (decimal years) 10.66 0.58 8.10�� 0.67 10.60 0.50N 39 39 31Reading quotient 78.70 6.80 104.00�� 9.10 103.80�� 6.9Raven’s (percentile) 45.38 26.90 52.44 30.8 50.97 24.2BAS reading age(decimal years)

8.39 0.94 8.42 0.92 11.01�� 0.92

Spelling (%) 31.50 13.40 22.20� 11.30 53.50�� 15.4Nonword reading (%) 54.8 23.50 57.70 28.90 85.40�� 10.6

Note. Cells are based on 39 poor readers (19 boys, 20 girls), 39 younger readers (18 boys, 21 girls), and 31

age-matched readers (13 boys, 18 girls). Raven’s¼Raven’s Progressive Coloured Matrices; BAS¼British

Ability Scales.�p< .01. ��p< .001 between control groups and poor readers by t test.

Strategic Approaches to Unfamiliar Words 269

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this test appears in Appendix A. The test was given to about six children at atime, and if a child could not guess what a particular word should be, he orshe was told. Scores were converted into percent correct. This spelling testhas high internal reliability (Cronbach’s a¼ .96).

Nonword reading test. Like the spelling test, the nonword reading testwas constructed for the present study. The children read aloud 64nonwords of 2 to 6 letters in length (e.g., bo and rakio) that graduallyincreased in difficulty. Testing was discontinued if there was failure on 10successive items. The test was designed to test skill in letter-to-soundtranslation and blending and has high internal reliability (Cronbach’sa¼ .96). The test items are shown in Appendix B.

Raven’s Progressive Coloured Matrices (Raven, Court, & Raven,1982). This is a well-established and widely used nonverbal test ofintellectual ability. It has three sections, each with 12 problems that haveto be solved. These increase in difficulty within and between each section.Each problem is presented in the form of a matrix, and the child has toselect one of six alternatives. The test was given to groups of about sixchildren, and the total scores were converted into percentiles according tothe child’s age. Internal consistency is high at greater than .90 (Kline, 1993).

Children’s strategies when encountering unfamiliar words. Each childwas asked the following: ‘‘What do you do when you are reading a bookor something and you come across a word that you can’t read?’’ Thisquestion was paraphrased and repeated when necessary. The followingcategories were annotated as the children spoke, so that the firstpreference received a 1, the next 2, and so on: (a) I try to sound it out, (b)I think of a word that’s like it, (c) I ask my teacher, (d) I ask a friend, (e) Iuse a dictionary, (f) I work it out from the other words (i.e., use context),(g) I just skip it and go on, and (h) other. When the children had made afirst response, they were encouraged to suggest other ways, but nosuggestions for responses were made.

Results

Table 1 shows the means for the tests of literacy and for Raven’s Matrices.The t-test comparisons between the poor readers and the two other groupsconfirmed the controlled differences between them with respect to readingage and reading quotient. Reading quotient was significantly worse onlyfor the poor readers, and reading age was significantly worse for the poorreaders and the younger readers relative to the chronological-age-matchedcontrols. Despite these controls, the poor readers were significantly better

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TABLE2

Frequenciesan

dPercentagesofFirst

andSeco

ndPreferencesforDeco

dingan

UnfamiliarWord

WhileRead

ingfortheThreeGroups:

Study1

Group

Soundout

Ask

teacher

Dictionary

Context

Skip

Analogy

Ask

friend

Other

Total

First

choice:Frequencies

Poorread

ers

27

51

11

11

239

Youngerread

ers

30

40

02

10

239

Agematch

ed

24

20

21

00

130

Total

81

11

13

42

15

108

First

choice:Percentagesread

ingdown

Poorread

ers

33.3

45.5

100.0

33.3

25.0

50.0

100.0

40.0

Youngerread

ers

37.0

36.4

0.0

0.0

50.0

50.0

0.0

40.0

Agematch

ed

29.6

18.2

0.0

66.7

25.0

0.0

0.0

20.0

First

choice:Percentagesread

ingacross

Poorread

ers

69.2

12.8

2.6

2.6

2.6

2.6

2.6

5.1

Youngerread

ers

76.9

10.3

0.0

0.0

5.1

2.6

0.0

5.1

Agematch

ed

80.0

6.7

0.0

6.7

3.3

0.0

0.0

3.3

Seco

ndch

oice:Frequencies

Poorread

ers

117

42

10

11

27

Youngerread

ers

13

22

10

12

12

Agematch

ed

26

21

21

30

17

Total

426

85

41

53

56

Seco

ndch

oice:Percentagesread

ingdown

Poorread

ers

25.0

65.4

50.0

40.0

25.0

0.0

20.0

33.3

Youngerread

ers

25.0

11.5

25.0

40.0

25.0

0.0

20.0

66.7

Agematch

ed

50.0

23.1

25.0

20.0

50.0

100.0

60.0

0.0

Seco

ndch

oice:Percentagesread

ingacross

Poorread

ers

3.7

63.0

14.8

7.4

3.7

0.0

3.7

3.7

Youngerread

ers

8.3

25.0

16.7

16.7

8.3

0.0

8.3

16.7

Agematch

ed

11.8

35.3

11.8

5.9

11.8

5.9

17.6

0.0

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at spelling than the younger readers, but, as expected, the poor readers weresignificantly worse than the age-matched group. There were no significantdifferences between the poor readers and the younger readers in nonwordreading, a test of letter–sound translation skills, but the poor readers weresignificantly worse than the age-matched group.

Table 2 gives the frequencies and percentages of children’s first andsecond preferences for strategies when they could not read a word in text.Thus, 69%, 77%, and 80% of the poor, younger, and age-matched readers,respectively, sounded out the word as their first choice, showing a majoritypreference (75% overall) for a phonics-like approach in these circumstances.There was no difference across the three groups in terms of using either asounding out strategy or some other strategy, v2(2, N¼ 108)¼ 1.17. As asecond choice, the greatest preference for all three groups was to ask theteacher. There was a much stronger preference for asking the teacher as athe second choice among the poor readers (65% of those indicating thispreference), and this effect was significant, v2(2, N¼ 56)¼ 6.03, p< .05,when the three groups were classified by either asking the teacher or usinganother strategy.

Discussion

The main finding of Study 1 was that the majority of children gave soundingout a word as their first preference, irrespective of their group membership.The difference between the groups emerged on their second preference,suggesting that this second preference may be a factor in reading delay(although it could equally be an effect of the situation of the poor readers).Because the poor readers were more often put in small groups with a teacherduring reading, or were simply given more attention by their teachers, thiscould be why they were more likely to ask their teacher. Alternatively, askingtheir teacher rather than working out the word for themselves may paradoxi-cally be a contributory cause of their poor reading. The test of nonword read-ing showed equivalent levels of decoding skills in the poor and youngerreaders. Nevertheless, despite the poor readers and younger readers beingweaker in phonics skills, they expressed the same degree of preference forthe phonics strategy as did the age-matched readers. Their preference forusing phonics with unfamiliar new words irrespective of their underlyingskill could be because they were being explicitly taught to use this strategyby their teachers.

A more minor aspect of these results that is not part of the focus of thisarticle relates to the characteristics of the participants when divided into theirrespective groups. The poor readers were at the same level of nonword read-ing as the younger reader controls and were significantly worse than thechronological-age-matched controls. This agrees with earlier work by Beechand Harding (1984) and Treiman and Hirsh-Pasek (1985), who found a

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similar lack of difference in nonword reading when poor readers or thosewith dyslexia were compared with younger readers of the same readingage. However, according to a review by Rack, Snowling, and Olson(1992), more studies have found significant differences. Nevertheless, thepoor readers and younger readers were also matched in letter–sound decod-ing skills in the present study. This result at least confirms equivalencebetween the poor readers and their reading-age-matched controls in phono-logical skills that is also commensurate with their reading ages.

Study 1 used a paradigm comparing poor readers to two control groupsin order to examine whether poor readers’ strategies for decoding unfamiliarwords in text corresponded more with their reading age or their chronologi-cal age. The second study focused more on the development of the readerrather than on those who are lagging in reading development. In that study,two groups of children split by age were examined to find out if there is adevelopmental progression in the strategy used when encountering difficultwords.

STUDY 2

Method

PARTICIPANTS

As previously described, children were selected randomly from 15 primaryschools within Leicestershire for the second study. Two groups were formed:a younger group (children aged between 7 years, 0 months, and 9 years,5 months) and an older group (children aged between 9 years, 6 months,and 11 years, 4 months). Initially, 270 children were tested; however, to bal-ance performance on Raven’s Matrices between the two age groups, thissample was reduced to 241. The younger group had 124 children (62 boys

TABLE 3 Means (SD) of Younger and Older Readers for Variables of Interest: Study 2

Measure

Younger readers Older readers

M SD M SD

Age (decimal years) 8.34 0.71 10.55�� 0.56Reading quotient 106.70 23.90 103.40 22.40Raven’s (percentile) 58.70 29.60 57.00 27.50BAS reading age(decimal years)

8.91 2.18 10.86�� 2.240

Spelling (%) 27.00 18.90 49.40�� 20.20Nonword reading (%) 55.30 32.40 75.70�� 23.20

Note. Cells are based on 124 younger readers and 117 older readers. Raven’s¼Raven’s Progressive

Coloured Matrices; BAS¼British Ability Scales.��p< .001 by t test.

Strategic Approaches to Unfamiliar Words 273

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and 62 girls), and the older group had 117 children (57 boys and 60 girls). Asin the first study, when matching the two groups, care was taken to ensurethat the two samples were equivalent in relative nonverbal intelligence asmeasured by Raven’s Matrices and reasonably balanced in gender. The per-formance of the two groups on the variables of interest is shown in Table 3.

PROCEDURE AND DESIGN

All participants were tested on the same variables as described for Study 1.Two groups of children divided by age were compared.

Results

Table 4 shows the first and second preferences for the strategy used whenmeeting an unfamiliar word. As in Study 1, the majority first preferencewas to sound out the word, and the majority second preference was to askthe teacher. This was the case for both age groups, with 68% and 71% ofthe younger and older groups, respectively, choosing to sound out as theirfirst choice. A further examination of these data showed that among theyounger children, 11 who had chosen sounding out for their first strategychose asking the teacher as their second. Among the older children, manymore (n¼ 29) had this combination of preferences. Conversely, only 2younger children chose asking the teacher followed by sounding out, andonly 1 older child had this same preference. Out of the 15 younger readerswho chose asking the teacher as their second preference, 11 of them(73.3%) had sounding out as their first choice. Similarly, out of the 33 olderreaders who had asking the teacher as their second preference, 29 of them(87.9%) had sounding out as their first choice.

A further analysis was undertaken dividing the children within eachgroup into those who sounded out for their first preference versus the rest,further subdivided by gender. Table 5 reveals an interesting gender differ-ence with the age groups. The younger children had an even split betweengenders in terms of preferences, whereas the older children were unevenlydivided. Most of the older girls (85%) preferred sounding out as their firstchoice, but proportionally fewer of the boys (56%) expressed a first prefer-ence for sounding out. This contrast between the genders for the olderchildren was significant, v2(1, N¼ 117)¼ 11.81, p< .01.

A comparison was made across the various tests between those whochose sounding out as their first strategy of choice and those who did not.Table 6 shows these comparisons within the two age groups. The only sig-nificant difference was in terms of age for the older readers. Those whosounded out tended to be older than those who did not, t(115)¼ 3.303,p< .01. It can be noted that differences in reported strategy use within thesesubgroups were not reflected in significant differences in literacy or

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TABLE4

Frequenciesan

dPercentagesofFirst

andSeco

ndPreferencesforDeco

dingan

UnfamiliarWord

WhileRead

ingfortheTwoGroups:

Study2

Group

Soundout

Ask

teacher

Dictionary

Context

Skip

Analogy

Ask

friend

Other

Total

First

choice:Frequencies

Youngerread

ers

84

18

72

22

18

124

Olderread

ers

83

13

46

32

23

116

Total

167

31

11

85

43

11

240

First

choice:Percentagesread

ingdown

Youngerread

ers

50.3

58.1

63.6

25.0

40.0

50.0

33.3

72.7

Olderread

ers

49.7

41.9

36.4

75.0

60.0

50.0

66.7

27.3

First

choice:Percentagesread

ingacross

Youngerread

ers

67.7

14.5

5.6

1.6

1.6

1.6

0.8

6.5

Olderread

ers

71.6

11.2

3.4

5.2

2.6

1.7

1.7

2.6

Seco

ndch

oice:Frequencies

Youngerread

ers

715

94

25

50

47

Olderread

ers

533

12

35

18

067

Total

12

48

21

77

613

0114

Seco

ndch

oice:Percentagesread

ingdown

Youngerread

ers

58.3

31.3

42.9

57.1

28.6

83.3

38.5

Olderread

ers

41.7

68.8

57.1

42.9

71.4

16.7

61.5

Seco

ndch

oice:Percentagesread

ingacross

Youngerread

ers

14.9

31.9

19.1

8.5

4.3

10.6

10.6

Olderread

ers

7.5

49.3

17.9

4.5

7.5

1.5

11.9

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phonology abilities for both age groups. However, for the younger readers,the difference in spelling age just failed to reach significance, t(122)¼ 1.948,p¼ .054.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

One major consistent finding across both studies is how most children reportthat as a first preference they identify an unfamiliar or difficult word in text by

TABLE 5 Frequencies and Percentages of Children Whose First Preference Is Sounding Outan Unfamiliar Word Versus the Rest, Divided by Age and Gender: Study 2

Younger readers Older readers

Strategy Male Female All Male Female All

FrequenciesSounding out 42 42 84 32 51 84Other 20 20 40 25 9 34Total 62 62 124 57 60 117

Percentages reading downSounding out 67.7 67.7 67.7 56.1 85.0 70.9Other 32.3 32.3 32.3 43.9 15.0 29.1

Percentages reading acrossSounding out 50.0 50.0 38.6 61.4Other 50.0 50.0 73.5 26.5

TABLE 6 Means (SD) of Younger and Older Readers Who Either Do or Do Not Sound Out asTheir First Choice for Variables of Interest: Study 2

Younger readers Older readers

Sound outDo not

sound out Sound outDo not

sound out

Measure M SD M SD M SD M SD

Age (decimal years) 8.35 0.71 8.33 0.70 10.64 0.57 10.32�� 0.49Reading quotient 104.50 20.50 111.20 29.60 101.80 21.4 107.1 24.6Raven’s(percentile)

56.50 29.00 63.30 30.90 54.50 26.9 63.1 28.6

BAS reading age(decimal years)

8.74 1.94 9.27 2.61 10.80 2.15 11.0 2.47

Spelling (%) 24.70 16.90 31.80 22.20 49.70 19.2 48.5 22.6Nonwordreading (%)

53.50 30.50 59.10 36.20 75.70 22.5 75.7 25.3

Note. Cells are based on 84 and 40 younger children and 83 and 34 older children for the sounding out and

non-sounding-out strategies, respectively. Raven’s¼Raven’s Progressive Coloured Matrices; BAS¼British

Ability Scales.��p< .01 within each age group between sounding out vs. other strategies by t test.

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breaking it down and sounding out its constituent sounds. This does notchange with reading age or with differences in reading skill. This is interest-ing, as one might have expected that as phonics training can improve readingperformance (Adams, 1990), there might be less inclination to use phonicsamong those who are less skilled in reading and those who are behind inreading. In addition, by testing nonword reading performance one can exam-ine any potential effect in relation to phonics skill. Significant differences innonword reading were found, but no corresponding changes were found instrategic preferences for using a phonological approach. One might expectthat those who are weak in alphabetical coding would be less willing touse this strategy. Thus, there is a reliable effect of a preference for a phono-logical strategy across age and across relative differences in reading ability.This is interesting in the context of the arguments put forward by Paris(2005), who considers phonological skills to be constrained skills in contrastto unconstrained skills (e.g., vocabulary development). Furthermore, Parissuggested that constrained skills have only limited temporal influence—onceletter-to-sound skills are learned, for example, asymptote in those skills isreached. Although this is a worthwhile way to view developing reading, chil-dren in the present study may explicitly continue to use such constrainedskills as an important part of their reading repertoire. In this sense, althoughimprovement in expertise in phonology decelerates with age, the strategicpreference to use that skill starts early and may continue at that level.

Another finding is that in the older group, significantly more girls thanboys said that the alphabetic approach was their first choice for decodingunfamiliar words. Although one must keep in mind the limitations ofself-report data, this might suggest that as soon as they are able, boys prefernot to use what (to them) might be seen as a slow process to get to a word’smeaning. There was no significant difference in nonword reading betweenthe groups, so this is a gender difference in reported preference for usingphonics rather than a difference in skill. Girls in Britain find it socially moreacceptable to work for examinations than boys (Warrington, Younger, &Williams, 2000). This suggests that girls are influenced by what is moresocially acceptable. In the same way, girls give more socially acceptableresponses, and perhaps they thought that the expected answer in the presentstudy was that they sound out unfamiliar words while reading. There are dif-ferences between the genders in that boys prefer to read nonfiction, whereasgirls enjoy fiction. Dawson (2000) found that Year 7 Australian girls had amore negative attitude toward the physical sciences and that this was thesame attitude that had been found 17 years earlier, despite improvementsto science education. Reading in different domains (fiction vs. nonfiction)may have different requirements for letter–sound translation. An alternativeinterpretation is that there could be a hormonal explanation for differencesbetween the genders (Beech & Beauvois, 2006), with a hypothesized weak-ness in phonics for boys, but because of the early teaching of phonics, this

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gender difference in strategic preference is masked. However, when suchphonics skills have reached their peak (Paris, 2005), a more natural incli-nation is to not use phonics and other strategies come to the fore.

A corollary to the strong preference for the use of phonics by all groupsis that other approaches are not chosen much. For example, there has beeninterest in the role of context in helping decode unfamiliar words in text.Stanovich (1981) suggested that as early word recognition is such a slow pro-cess, some will rely on the use of context and try to guess the word ratherthan use an alphabetic approach. Goodman (1970) suggested that fluentreaders make more use of context, as they do better reading words in textthan reading the same words read alone. However, others (Perfetti & Roth,1981) have shown that contextual guessing is likely to slow down the morefluent reader.

It should be stressed that the present studies examined what happenswhen reading breaks down and there is a problem caused by an unfamiliarword. Levy (1999) reported an experiment that appears to lead to a differentconclusion than that arrived at by Share (1999; described earlier). Levyshowed how many repetitions of words presented on a computer screencan subsequently help word-naming time at a later point. The effect occurredfor both good and poor readers irrespective of spelling regularity, indicatingthat alphabetic coding was not an essential part of the repetition task. In theclassroom (and home), frequent reading practice is needed to help readingperformance by helping automatic word retrieval. Given this context, theuse of alphabetic codes may only be necessary to keep the flow of infor-mation when awkward words are met. An efficient (but not too disruptive)alphabetic identification of the word should help in the speedy resumptionof the reading of the passage.

A minor aspect of the second study related to children’s second choicesis worthy of further discussion. Although virtually all of the children gave afirst strategy, the number offering a second strategy fell to 114 (47.75%). Inaddition, it is noteworthy that fewer younger children offered a second strat-egy (38.5% vs. 56.8% for older children). Does this drop off in number meanthat more than half the participants use only one strategy in these circum-stances? Some reasons for this drop off could be (a) a reluctance to use asecond strategy, (b) an inability to use a second strategy, (c) an inabilityon the spur of the moment to think up or describe another strategy, or(d) a reluctance to communicate further on the matter. However, it wouldbe difficult to separate these explanations with the present data, especiallyas they could all explain why there were fewer responses from the youngerparticipants.

There are obvious limitations to asking children for the strategies theythink they use when encountering unfamiliar words. They were being askedto think about mental processes that may actually be unavailable to thembecause they have become automated. They may instead have given

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responses that they thought they ought to give or that were the only onesthey could describe. For instance, some children might have suggested astrategy that they were told to use by their teacher. Likewise, they maydescribed a sounding out strategy, although what they actually used underthese circumstances may be much more complicated and too difficult todescribe verbally. Furthermore, one might plausibly have expected that thosewho are good at phonological processing, such as shown by their ability toread nonwords, would be more likely to report using a sounding outapproach when dealing with an unfamiliar word. This was not shownin the present study. It might therefore be argued that the children’sdescriptions of their metacognitive processes are poor or worse still,epiphenomenal.

The other side of the argument is threefold. First, it could be worthwhileto appreciate that there may be a mismatch between children’s reports oftheir cognitive processes and their actual processes. Second, the reportscould be genuine in that a child who reported using sounding out did notnecessarily mean that he or she was actually good at using this approach.Third, there was one result showing a connection between self-report andperformance. There was a marginally significant result insofar that youngerchildren, whose first strategy was to sound out words, were worse in spellingthan those who had other first strategies. This was possibly because anover-reliance on sounding out could be detrimental to the spelling of irregu-lar words. It is also possible that a proportion of those who said that they didnot use a phonics strategy for their first choice were more automated readerswho read passages more for gist, leaving out awkward words along the way.There was a tendency for standard deviations to be relatively larger in bothage groups in Study 2 for the non-sounding-out children, suggesting thepresence of both readers who were more expert and those who were lessexpert and lacking in phonics skills.

In conclusion, both studies show that most children report that they pre-fer to identify an unfamiliar or difficult word in text by breaking it down andsounding out its constituent sounds. This preference does not change withreading age or with differences in reading skill relative to age. Many studieshave shown that training in phonology, including letter–sound connections,improves subsequent reading performance (Bus & van IJzendoorn, 1999).One might have expected both younger children and older poor readersto be less inclined than other children to use phonics. Similarly, one mighthave expected the reported preference for using phonics to be related to skillin the use of phonics, as measured by nonword reading. However, none ofthese expectations were realized. Most children, irrespective of underlyingskills, said that they prefer to use phonics as a first approach to decodingunfamiliar words. Accordingly, this reported first preference does not appearto explain reading delay, as there was no significant difference between thethree groups in the first study; however, the second preference among poor

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readers to ask their teacher was significant. In the present results, this couldbe an effect of reading delay, in that poor readers were placed in closer con-tact with teachers than were children in the other two groups. Another possi-bility is that it could be a contributory cause to their poor reading, in thatteachers may be supplying poor readers with solutions too readily ratherthan encouraging them to develop self-sustaining decoding strategies.Another notable finding is that a large proportion of older boys may beimpatient with segmenting difficult words and may instead prefer to useother strategies in order to continue with what they are reading. Taken over-all, these findings appear to show that most children use an explicit phono-logical strategy when experiencing difficulty in their reading, but poorerreaders do not seem to have alternative strategies readily available apart fromgoing to seek help.

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Adams, M. J., & Huggins, A. W. F. (1985). The growth of children’s sight vocabulary:A quick test with educational and theoretical implications. Reading ResearchQuarterly, 20, 262–281.

Baron, J. (1977). Mechanisms for pronouncing printed words: Use and acquisition.In D. LaBerge & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), Basic processes in reading: Perceptionand comprehension (pp. 175–216). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Beech, J. R., & Beauvois, M. W. (2006). Early experience of sex hormones as apredictor of reading, phonology and auditory perception. Brain and Language,96, 49–58.

Beech, J. R., & Harding, L. M. (1984). Phonemic processing and the poor reader froma developmental lag viewpoint. Reading Research Quarterly, 19, 357–366.

Bradley, L., & Bryant, P. E. (1983, February 3). Categorizing sounds and learning toread: A causal connection. Nature, 301, 419–421.

Bryant, P., & Goswami, U. (1987). Phonological awareness and learning to read. InJ. R. Beech & A. Colley (Eds.), Cognitive approaches to reading (pp. 213–243).Chichester, England: Wiley.

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Dawson, C. (2000). Upper primary boys’ and girls’ interests in science: Have theychanged since 1980? International Journal of Science Education, 22, 557–570.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Stahl, S. A., & Willows, D. M. (2001). Systematic phonicsinstruction helps students learn to read: Evidence from the National ReadingPanel’s meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 71, 393–447.

Ehri, L. C., Nunes, S. R., Willows, D. M., Schuster, B. V., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., &Shanahan, T. (2001). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn toread: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis. ReadingResearch Quarterly, 36, 250–287.

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APPENDIX A

Children’s Spelling Test

Please fill the gaps in the words below:

For example: han____ should have d added to make: hand.

(Some words have words next to them in brackets with a similar meaning tohelp you.)

tr____ do____ be____ ____gfl____ f____r ____ite b____gr___nd (floor) low___st bra___n (mind)am___nt n___ise (din) rem___n (stay)w___rry (fret) d___ncing dam__g__(harm)m___ny (a lot) m___ther (mum) ag___nst m___veh___ndred (100) b___rds (have

feathers)not___ce

d___ghter s___rch (look for) br____t (like bring)to fr___ze (get cold) av___d (shun) rec____t (lately)inst__nce (example) liq___d (like water) a___ist (help)to g___ss (to thinklikely)

attend___nce d___scription

gen____ne (real) accord___nce anx____s (worried)appr___val finan___al capa___ity su___essfulprelimin___ry res___rce prolog___ col___nelc___rteous (polite) defin___t___ (certain) g___rantee

Spelling keyScore either 1 or 0 for the whole word.

Line Legal words1. tree doll bell egg (or ring)2. flower four write book3. ground lowest brain4. amount noise remain5. worry dancing damage6. many mother against move (or mauve)7. hundred birds notice8. daughter search brought9. freeze avoid recent10. instance liquid assist11. guess attendance description

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12. genuine accordance anxious13. approval financial capacity successful14. preliminary resource prologue colonel15. courteous definite guarantee

Note. Each of the first eight items had a line drawing next to it,and the hand example had a drawing of a hand. The sixthitem had a large digit 4 next to it.

APPENDIX B

Nonword Reading Test

pi bo ta nika mab jep ritlan bof dap peltup ket sep lebfon rad heg hin

chup gesh thip snofvid thid yust withoudalsa ghich gery knepcime weasher bove untersponds caze borms whark

verg pimes rakio whonehom woulk ovet lipestull sood dalled foutomce molk bink idordimb prip guast werp

hetoes pigan wrop garosh

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