Education and demonstration – Language – Spelling – phonics – word recognition – or sentence formation
Reexamination Certificate
2000-11-08
2004-06-29
Hughes, S. Thomas (Department: 3714)
Education and demonstration
Language
Spelling, phonics, word recognition, or sentence formation
C434S169000, C434S30700R, C434S350000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06755657
ABSTRACT:
APPENDICES
Two appendices are attached that contain 1) a description of each training module (and each game within each training module) in the training tool in accordance with the invention (Appendix A); and 2) a level listing from each game with each training module. These two appendices are attached to the application and are incorporated herein by reference.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates generally to a system and method for assessing and training a user to improve the user's reading and spelling skills and in particular to a system and method for training a user's phonological awareness and processing, auditory processing, morphological awareness, print awareness, visual orthographic memory (VOM), phonics, decoding and spelling skills in order to improve the user's reading and spelling skills.
Skilled reading involves a complex system of skills and processes and is dependent upon an amalgam of word appearances, meanings and pronunciations. The knowledge and activities required to become a skilled reader can be developed systematically and have been studied heavily by researchers. Recently, particular attention has been focused on the importance of children's ability to learn the alphabetic principle (recognizing that sounds in spoken words can be represented by a letter or letter). Leading researchers have shown that coupling phonological awareness training with letter-sound correspondence training increases children's ability to develop sophisticated decoding and spelling skills—particularly for those children who have difficulty learning developmental literacy skills.
Beginning readers need to develop a strong foundation of phonological awareness, letter knowledge and vocabulary. Word recognition and spelling are facilitated by a network of connections that link the phonological, orthographic, morphological and semantic characteristics of words (Ehri, 1992). Phonological connections are defined by children's ability to notice, think about or manipulate the sounds in language (Torgesen, 1997) and are essential to establishing complete representations of words in memory. Orthographic connections are defined by children's awareness of functional letter units symbolizing phonemes (including their shapes, names and sounds) as well as letter sequences that distinguish various word spellings from one another (Perfetti, 1992). Orthographic and phonological connections work together to benefit decoding, spelling and automatic word recognition when children first begin to read. As children progress through school and encounter longer, more complex words, they will need additional knowledge about syllable patterns and meaning-based spelling patterns (Henderson, 1991). The relative lack of phonetic substance of grammatical morphemes such as “ed”, “ing” “s” and “es” makes them less prominent than content words, therefore, they are acquired later and are more problematic for some children (McGregor, 1997). Here, semantic and morphological connections become more important as children's awareness of spelling patterns involves how spellings relate to meaningful units. This knowledge is essential for children to move beyond using only letter-sound correspondences to process printed language and into making meaningful connections to read and spell irregular and/or more complex words.
Beginning readers need to develop an understanding of the alphabetic principle. Instruction that addresses the needs of beginning readers must systematically bridge spoken language with conventions of printed language. Different types of connections between letters and sounds dominate children's decoding and spelling at different points in development (Ehri, 1998; Treiman, 1992). Initially, Children also rely heavily on letter names which mark their attempts at representing pronunciations of words with printed letters that they know (Moats, 1995; Templeton & Bear, 1992). As children learn letter sounds, they begin to develop more robust knowledge of the alphabetic system and start to link the most salient letters in print to sounds in pronunciations. Because initial and final letters are the most salient to children, they are typically the first connections to be recognized and represented in spellings (Ehri, 1998). When children establish sufficient connections between letters and sounds, they begin to develop accumulations of words in memory and recognize recurring spelling patterns. Once this awareness is developed, children can discover that consolidating individual letter-sound correspondences into multi-letter chunks can facilitate automatic recognition and can be used to decode unknown words with the same spelling pattern (Gaskins, 1998). However, because spelling and decoding require explicit recall and recognition of orthographic sequences, particularly for words that have unique or irregular spelling patterns, children must further develop their knowledge of the internal characteristics of words, such as individual letter-sound correspondences, particularly for the medial vowel (Moats, 1995). Instruction that reinforces patterns as well as alphabetic connections linking all of the spellings in printed words to pronunciations in spoken words will help children develop mature representations of thousands of words in memory that can be used to automatically and accurately access words or parts of words for decoding and spelling.
Beginning readers need to develop word reading automatically. One way to read words is to decode individual letter-sound correspondences. Most readers use this skill to read words they do not know. However, attacking letter-sound correspondences, although essential for learning to read and for reading unfamiliar words, is often slow and sometimes not useful when encountering words with irregular and variable spelling-pronunciation relationships (e.g., read/read) (Ehri, 1992). Most experienced readers have learned to process chunks of letters in recurring spelling patterns to decode words. They also have stored words from previous experiences reading words that cannot be decoded by attacking letter-sound correspondences. Research shows that first-grade children need a minimum of four experiences with words to read them automatically (Reitsma, 1983); thus, learning to establish sight word reading skills takes time and repeated exposures to print. Research also shows that being able to read words quickly and accurately facilitates reading fluency and increases the probability that children are understanding what they are reading (Perfetti, 1992). Many students with reading problems have poor automatic word recognition skills that affect their ability to comprehend what they read (Stanovich, 1986). Instruction that is focused on children's ability to decode unfamiliar words and is designed to develop more advanced, automatic word recognition skills will help children establish basic skills that must be in place to develop automatic word recognition and ultimately better reading fluency. By increasing automatic word recognition, children will have more cognitive resources to use for understanding text and drawing information and inferences from what is read (Adams, 1990; Stanovich, 1986).
Beginning readers need to be taught to recognize patterns in how words are spelled and pronounced. Early phonological knowledge is often characterized by awareness of gross phonological units such as whole words or syllables. At the very earliest stages of literacy acquisition, young children demonstrate the ability to recognize and categorize words that rhyme (Goswami & Bryant, 1990), but continue to struggle with awareness of phonemes until they are taught to read or receive explicit phonemic awareness instruction. As reading and spelling skills become more refined, however, children develop a more detailed understanding of the underlying sound structure of spoken words and become aware of individual phonemes in speech as well as how they relate to printed words. Many researchers argue the rhyme awareness serves as the precur
Cognitive Concepts, Inc.
Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich LLP
Hughes S. Thomas
Sotomayor John
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