Teaching Children to Read Irregular Words: A Comparison of Three Instructional Methods

ABSTRACT

Purpose

Children learning to read in English must learn to read words with varying degrees of grapheme-phoneme correspondence regularity, but there is very little research comparing methods of instruction for words with less predictable or irregular spellings. Therefore, we compared three methods of instruction for beginning readers.

Method

Eighty-five Kindergarten children were randomly assigned to either Look and Say (LSay), Look and Spell (LSpell), mispronunciation correction (MPC), or wait-list control conditions. Children were taught 12 irregular words over three sessions. Amount of instructional time and number of exposures to the written and spoken forms of the words was controlled across the three experimental conditions. After training, children were assessed on reading aloud and orthographic choice measures.

Results

Children showed evidence of superior learning of trained words in the LSpell and MPC conditions, compared to LSay and control conditions. Differences between the LSpell and MPC conditions were not significant. There was no evidence of generalization to untrained items.

Conclusions

Findings indicate that active processing of a word’s orthography is crucial for learning irregular words. These results have implications for initial reading instruction. Further research is required to determine whether differences between LSpell and MPC conditions emerge after longer periods of training.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council (grant number DP200100311) to Anne Castles, Kate Nation, Lisi Beyersmann and Erik Reichle. We would like to thank the participating children and their parents, class teachers and senior staff at participating primary schools, and Sarah Coen and Ashna Arora for their assistance with data collection and data entry.

Disclosure statement

There are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

Data and analysis code for this study are available at https://osf.io/cj7xr/

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP200100311].