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Published: 14 July 2016

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Dr Kerry Hempenstall, Senior Industry Fellow, School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

My blogs can be viewed on-line or downloaded as a Word file or PDF at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/olxpifutwcgvg8j/AABU8YNr4ZxiXPXzvHrrirR8a?dl=0

New Addition - March 2025

So, at the end of this section is my paper from some years ago.

Below is the update of studies that were restricted to the years from 2020 to 2025.

Has the old or the young system been more helpful?

So, is it more beneficial to teach sounds first or letters first? There are further issues too!

“When synthetic phonics is taught explicitly, students will learn the associations between the letters and their sounds in a direct and usually systematic way, separately from text reading. This may comprise showing students the graphemes (letters or letter combinations) and teaching them the sounds that correspond to them, as in ‘this letter makes the sound ssss.’ Alternatively, some teachers prefer teaching students single sounds (phonemes) orally at first, and then later introducing the visual cue (the grapheme) for the sound, as in ‘You know the mmmm sound we’ve been practising, well here’s the letter used in writing that tells us to make that sound.’” (p. 11)

Hempenstall, K. (2016). Read about it: Scientific evidence for effective teaching of reading. CIS Research Report 11. Sydney: The Centre for Independent Studies. Retrieved from https://www.cis.org.au/app/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/2016/03/rr11.pdf

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Handwriting accuracy to literacy skills (2024)

“There is widespread concern about declining literacy skills in recent young Japanese. The present study investigated how higher-level reading and writing proficiencies are underpinned by basic literacy skills in Japanese adolescents. From a large database of the most popular literacy exams in Japan, we retrospectively analyzed word- and text-level data for middle and high school students who had taken the exams during the same period in the 2019 academic year using structural equation modeling. We extracted  main data for 161 students as well as six independent datasets for validation.

Our results validated the three-dimensional view of word-level literacy (reading accuracy, writing accuracy, and semantic comprehension) and demonstrated that writing and semantic skills underpinned text writing and reading, respectively.

The semantic comprehension of words affected text writing indirectly via text reading; however, it could not replace the direct effect of word writing accuracy. These findings, which were robustly replicated with multiple independent datasets, provided new evidence of dimension-specific relationships between word- and text-level literacy skills and confirmed the unique contribution of word handwriting acquisition to text literacy proficiency.

The replacement of handwriting by digital writing (e.g., typing) is a global trend. However, the dual-pathway model of literacy development identified in this study suggests there are advantages in sustaining early literacy education by handwriting for the growth of higher-level language skills in future generations.

Conclusion

This study clarified the structural relationships among multidimensional word- and text-level literacy skills, and provided new evidence of the unique contribution of handwriting accuracy to literacy proficiency in Japanese adolescents.

Our results revealed that word-level comprehension skills could not replace the direct effect of word-level handwriting on text-level writing skills. This implies the replacement of handwriting by digital writing in our society may partly explain the reported decline in literacy skills in the contemporary population, which is a matter of public concern in Japan.

Our findings warrant further research on the effect of handwriting practices on higher-level language and cognitive skills in children and adults acquiring Japanese or other orthographies, with or without linguistic difficulties.”

Otsuka, S., & Murai, T. The unique contribution of handwriting accuracy to literacy skills in Japanese adolescents. Read Writ 37, 1183–1208 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10433-3

“Abstract: Recent research has revealed that the substitution of handwriting practice for typing may hinder the initial steps of reading development. Two hypotheses for the detrimental effect of typing are (a) reduced graphomotor activity and (b) reduced variability in the visual letter forms. However, previous studies were mostly limited to letter learning and primarily employed the visual identification of letters as a learning index.

The current experiment investigated the impact of graphomotor action and output variability in letter and word learning using a variety of tasks. A total of 50 prereaders learned nine letters and 16 pseudowords made up of these letters across four learning conditions: copying the letters/words by hand, tracing the letters/words, typing the letters/words on a computer with several fonts, and typing with a single font. Posttest tasks included naming, writing, and visual identification of the trained letters and words.

Results showed that children in the handwriting groups (i.e., trained through hand-copying or tracing) achieved higher accuracy across all posttest tasks compared with those in the typing groups. These outcomes illustrate the importance of handwriting experience in learning alphabetic and orthographic representations, favoring the graphomotor hypothesis. Thus, educators should be cautious about replacing pencil and paper with digital devices during the period of children’s reading acquisition.”

Gorka Ibaibarriaga, Joana Acha, Manuel Perea, The impact of handwriting and typing practice in children’s letter and word learning: Implications for literacy development, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Volume 253, 106 195, ISSN 0022-0965, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2025.106195

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096525000013

The paper is concerned with exploring new ways of determining grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences in English. In contrast to previous studies, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are based here on the analysis of connected text/discourse, rather than a dictionary list of words. The paper also attempts to sharpen the traditional (but sometimes vague) notion of orthographic depth by separating it into three main components: grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences, graphemic complexity, and grapheme-to-phoneme mapping rules.

The first two components, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences and graphemic complexity, represent what is referred to here as graphemic depth. Graphemic depth is an objectively quantifiable parameter which can be expressed by entropy values of individual English graphemes. Such a parameter can be used in the future in inter-linguistic and intra-linguistic reading research.

INTRODUCTION Although alphabetic writing systems are generally expected to reflect the sounds of spoken language, the mappings between the graphical forms of language and the actual pronunciation of sounds are never in a one-to-one correspondence.

It has been established that there are languages in which letters map onto sounds relatively consistently, and such orthographies are referred to as transparent or shallow. On the other hand, there are languages in which the same letters or letter sequences are often pronounced in many different ways, or the same phonemes are realized by means of many different letters.

Such writing systems are usually called non-transparent, opaque or deep (Katz and Frost, 1992; Gontijo, Gontijo, and Shillcock, 2003; Borgwaldt, Hellwig, and De Groot, 2005; Ziegler and Goswami, 2005; Protopapas and Vlahou, 2009). This degree of the correspondence between letters and sounds (or the reliability of print-to-speech correspondences) has therefore been termed orthographic depth (Katz and Frost, 1992; Van den Bosch, Content, Daelemans, and de Gelder, 1994; Borgwaldt, Hellwig, and De Groot, 2004; Schmalz, Marinus, Coltheart, and Castles, 2015).

Orthographic depth (OD) is important especially in the research on reading acquisition, written word recognition, and reading disorders, but it also has a role to play in the formulation of various theories of reading, as well as in the development of computer text-to-speech conversion algorithms (Frost, Katz, and Bentin, 1987; Siegel and Faux, 1989; Katz and Frost, 1992; Divay and Vitale, 1997; Rastle and Coltheart, 1999; Ziegler et al. 2010; Miller, Kargin, and Guldenoglu, 2014).

It has been shown in many works that in languages with shallow orthographies (such as Croatian, Turkish, Czech, or Slovak), word recognition is based mostly on the prelexical assemblage of graphemes (defined as singleletter or multi-letter units) which tend to be in a one-to-one correspondence with phonemes.

As a result, beginning readers find it relatively easy to learn to read in such transparent orthographies. In contrast, readers of languages with deep orthographies (e.g. English, French, Danish) are faced with a highly inconsistent system of correspondences which often forces them to resort to a different strategy.

It has been shown in many works that in languages with shallow orthographies (such as Croatian, Turkish, Czech, or Slovak), word recognition is based mostly on the prelexical assemblage of graphemes (defined as single letter or multi-letter units) which tend to be in a one-to-one correspondence with phonemes.

As a result, beginning readers find it relatively easy to learn to read in such transparent orthographies. In contrast, readers of languages with deep orthographies (e.g. English, French, Danish) are faced with a highly inconsistent system of correspondences which often forces them to resort to a different strategy. They recognize words mostly holistically, in larger chunks (e.g. bodies, syllables, morphemes) which they retrieve from lexical storage.

It needs to be stressed, however, that both strategies are used in the languages studied so far, but to different degrees (Katz and Frost, 1992; Rastle and Coltheart, 1999; Ziegler et al. 2010; Caravolas, Mikulajová, and Kucharská, 2019; Borleffs, Maassen, Lyytinen, and Zwarts, 2019).

English language can be characterized as a complex and largely irregular system of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). For example, grapheme ch is realized in English as /tʃ/ in chew, /k/ in ochre, and /ʃ/ in machine, grapheme a can be pronounced as /æ/ in cat, /e/ in many, /ə/ in above, /ɪ/ in heritage, and so on. In other words, English boasts one of the richest sets.

To conclude this section, five main aims of this paper will be specified: (a) To break down the notion of OD into separate but related components, (b) to determine the English GPCs on the basis of several new rules of segmentation, (c) to calculate entropy values of CPCs including frequency-based measures, (d) to calculate the values of English graphemes in terms of the parameter of graphemic complexity, and (e) to set up a notion of graphemic depth, which will be represented by a combination of the entropy values of GPCs and graphemic complexity.

Pavlík, Radoslav and Bojo, Peter (2023). Another look at grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences and orthographic depth in English. In: Philologia 33 (1): pp. 23 – 47.

“Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize and manipulate the spoken parts of sentences and words. Examples include being able to identify words that rhyme, recognizing alliteration, segmenting a sentence into words, identifying the syllables in a word, and blending and segmenting onset-rimes. The most sophisticated — and last to develop — is called phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness is the ability to notice, think about, and work with the individual sounds (phonemes) in spoken words. This includes blending sounds into words, segmenting words into sounds, and deleting and playing with the sounds in spoken words.

Phonological awareness (PA) involves a continuum of skills that develop over time and that are crucial for reading and spelling success, because they are central to learning to decode and spell printed words. Phonological awareness is especially important at the earliest stages of reading development — in pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade for typical readers.

Explicit teaching of phonological awareness in these early years can eliminate future reading problems for many students. However, struggling decoders of any age can work on phonological awareness, especially if they evidence problems in blending or segmenting phonemes.

How does phonics fit in?

Phonics refers to knowledge of letter sounds and the ability to apply that knowledge in decoding unfamiliar printed words. Whereas phonological awareness refers to an awareness of the sounds in spoken words, as well as the ability to manipulate those sounds.

Phonological awareness refers to oral language and phonics refers to print. 

Both of these skills are very important and tend to interact in reading development, but they are distinct skills; children can have weaknesses in one of them but not the other.

For example, a child who knows letter sounds but cannot blend the sounds to form the whole word has a phonological awareness (specifically, a phonemic awareness) problem. Conversely, a child who can orally blend sounds with ease but mixes up vowel letter sounds, reading pit for pet and set for sit, has a phonics problem.

Reading Rockets (2025). Phonological and Phonemic Awareness: Introduction. https://www.readingrockets.org/reading-101/reading-101-learning-modules/course-modules/phonological-and-phonemic-awareness

“Learning the relationships between letters and sounds is a key component of early literacy development and a central aim during the first year of school. Introducing one new letter a week is the most common approach in many countries, but little is known about how the pace of letter instruction contributes to the development of early literacy skills.

This study used a natural experiment to investigate how a faster pace of letter instruction influences the development of letter knowledge, word reading, and spelling during the first year of school.

Regression analysis showed that a faster pace yielded significantly better results for all outcome measures, and logistic-regression models showed that the lowest-performing children benefited  more than the highest-performing one from a faster pace. The study concludes with a discussion of those novel findings and suggestions about their implications for teaching practice.”

Sunde, K., Furnes, B., & Lundetræ, K. (2020). Does introducing the letters faster boost the development of children’s letter knowledge, word reading and spelling in the first year of school? Scientific Studies of Reading, 24(2), 141-158. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888438.2019.1615491

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So, what is to be made of all the G to B and B to J? Maybe the older document that we read is more helpful! At least some of the issues in the older document have been supported in this new one. One thing noticed is that there are now far more issues being examined than there were way back in time.

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This next segment is the original, broader document and includes earlier periods.

We know that beginners' knowledge of the relationship between letters and sounds is highly predictive of their subsequent reading success.

“The strongest single predictor of first grade reading performance, among the measures administered in kindergarten, was letter identification (as measured by the letter identification subtest of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test-Revised) (Woodcock, 1987).” (p.32)

Mazzocco, M., Denckla, M., Singer, H., Scanlon, D., Vellutino, F., & Reiss, A. (1997). Neurogenic and neurodevelopmental pathways to learning disabilities. Learning Disabilities: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8, 31-42.

“Letter knowledge among prekindergartners and kindergartners is one of the best predictors of reading and spelling acquisition later in school. This holds true in English, French, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Hebrew (e.g., Adams, 1990, Ball and Blachman, 1991, Bradley and Bryant, 1983, Bruck et al., 1997, Byrne and Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, de Jong and van der Leij, 1999 and Muter et al., 1998). Letter knowledge as a predictor not only surpasses IQ and vocabulary (e.g., Caravolas et al., 2001, Cardoso-Martins, 1995, McBride-Chang, 1999, Shatil et al., 2000 and Stuart and Coltheart, 1988) but at times also competes successfully with some tests of phonological awareness (e.g., Johnston, Anderson, & Holligan, 1996).” (p. 139)

Levin, I., Shatil-Carmon, S., & Asif-Rave, O. (2006). Learning of letter names and sounds and their contribution to word recognition. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 93(2), 139-165.

See also:

Adams, M.J. (1990). Beginning to read: Thinking and learning about print. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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