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Learning about Letters as a Foundation for Learning to Read and Spell| old_uid | 4331 |
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| title | Learning about Letters as a Foundation for Learning to Read and Spell |
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| start_date | 2008/03/17 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Learning about letters—their visual shapes, their conventional names, and the phonemes that they symbolize—is an important foundation for learning to read and spell. Children in the United States typically learn the names of many letters well before formal reading instruction begins. They normally learn the letters’ sounds only after they have become familiarwith the names. In Britain, in contrast, letter sounds are usually emphasized over letter names. One research study to be described looks at the formal and informal educational policies in the two countries and how they affect children’s early literacy learning.
The results show that children use what they learn first about a letter— whether it be the conventional name or the sound label—to learn about the letter’s other characteristics. There is transfer between the tasks of learning letters’ names and sounds because the names of most English letters are phonetically iconic: They contain the phoneme that the letter symbolizes. The name of v, for example, contains the sound /v/. Many researchers have proposed that phonological awareness is essential for deriving the sound of a letter such as v from its name. However, data from another research study to be presented suggest that phonological awareness, as it is commonly measured, is not required in order to benefit from the phonetic iconicity of letter names. |
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| responsibles | Cohen, Kergoat |
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