Variation in words may help early readers learn better, a new study has indicated.Many educators have long believed that when words differ on only one sound, early readers can learn the rules of phonics by focusing on what is different between the words.
This is thought to be a critical gateway to reading words and sentences. A recent study shows that certain kinds of variation in words may help early readers learn better. When children see the same phonics regularities, embedded in words with more variation, they may learn these crucial early reading skills better.
What might appear to make learning a more difficult task — learning about letter-sound relationships from words with more variation — actually leads to better learning. Based on the Varied Practice Model, which helps children master early reading skills like phonics, the research team used Access Code to conduct the study directly in the classroom.
During the study, one group of students learned using lists of words with a small, less variable set of consonants, such as maid, mad, paid, and pad. This is close to traditional phonics instruction, which uses similar words to help illustrate the rules and, presumably, simplify the problem for learners.
A second group of students learned using a list of words that was more variable, such as bait, sad, hair, and gap, but which embodied the same rules.
After three or four days of training on phonics skills, partaking in activities such as spelling and matching letters, the students from both groups were tested to see if they could read words that they had never seen before, read novel non-words, and apply their newly-learned skills to tasks they hadn’t done before.
“We were interested in not just whether they could do exactly what we were teaching, but whether they could learn something more robust that would enable them to apply what they had learned to new tasks and new words,” McMurray said. “Critically, we wanted to know if variability or similarity would impact this ability to learn and generalise.
“We were expecting a very subtle effect, maybe similar words would help students learn the words they were trained on but maybe not generalize as well, or maybe similar words would help them learn the more difficult rules but variability might work for the easier ones, but in no case was similarity helpful.