Research Project Presentation

The Effects of an Early Literacy Intervention with Explicit Decoding and Encoding Instruction on a First Grade Student’s Phonological Awareness, Spelling, and Early Reading Development

Elise Schultz McDaniel College

index

Results and Analysis

Research Question

Measures

Abstract

Conclusion and Self Reflection

Literature Review

Intervention

References

Research Question

How does an early literacy intervention with explicit decoding and encoding instruction affect a first grade student’s phonological awareness, spelling, and early reading development?

This early literacy case study was a semester long project with a first grade student who would be considered a striving reader. This student was assessed using eight pre assessments in order to triangulate the data from those assessments and identify strengths and areas for growth. Afterwards, I was able to plan and implement ten intervention lessons over a span of five weeks to work with the case study student in order for her to meet her reading, writing, and word study goals. Finally, the same eight post assessments were administered and the data was once again analyzed in order to determine the student's progress and determine future goals for that student.

Abstract

Literature Review: What Does Writing Instruction Look Like in an Effective Literacy Intervention?

• Research has shown that the best way to implement writing in an effective literacy intervention is through interactive writing. Interactive writing will allow for students to practice various skills such as, phonological awareness and alphabetic skills, while the teacher can be responsive and scaffold the writing process for the students (Craig 2006).
• One of the reasons why writing is so essential in the literacy intervention process is because it is giving students the opportunity to continue to build and practice skills that are developed in other parts of the lesson like reading or word building.
• In addition to phonological awareness and alphabetic knowledge, writing also supports skills such as language development and concepts of print. In writing, students create stories and messages and can become active participants in literacy through the application of these skills; therefore, making them active in learning the information as opposed to receivers of the information (Rohde, 2015).
• Interactive writing refers to the writing task where the teacher is responsive to the student during the writing process. The teacher is seen as a mediator during the writing instruction through conversation and scaffolding in order to engage students in participating in the process. The task will include the negotiation of a message to compose between the student and teacher. This sharing the pen method will provide the teacher with opportunities to make teaching points related to the writing (Craig, 2006).
• In general, literacy instruction that is responsive to the students, is considered to be the most effective kind of intervention. In this case the teacher can actively assess students during the lesson and after in order to plan the next lesson by tailoring it to their ever-changing needs (Lipson et al., 2012).
• For example, kindergarten students who were taught using interactive writing versus kindergarten students taught using metalinguistic games demonstrated improvements in real word identification, passage comprehension, and word reading development (Craig 2006).

Intervention

This early literacy intervention was a structured cycle with three specific components taught during each lesson. These components were reading, word work, and writing. There were 10, 30-minute intervention lessons that were taught twice a week over the course of 5 weeks. The intervention lessons were planned specifically with the students goals in mind and were constantly being adjusted to meet her needs.

Writing

Writing was done in an interactive writing sharing the pen style. The student and teacher would negotiate a message and the teacher would support the student in composing it.

Reading

This componenet included a familiar reading, running record of the previous lesson's book and a shared or guided reading of the new book.

Word Work

Word work included activities working with letter formation, high frequency words, or making and breaking words.

Results and Analysis

Reading: Kalynn showed evidence of progress towards her reading goal. Over the course of the interventions and during the post assessments, she made greater attempts to segment written words into spoken phonemes and blend those phonemes to read words. She also more consistently used one-to-one correspondence while reading. During the pre assessments she read her level 2 book with an 85% accuracy rate and read the same book with a 90% accuracy rate during post assessing. Word study: Kalynn showed evidence as meeting her word study goals because she was able to identify five more high frequency words on the word reading assessment. She also did not score lower than an 8/10 on any of the DAPPA questions. Therefore, Kalynn was showing evidence she could segement words into their individual phonemes and blend those sounds together as well as manipulate the sounds in words. Writing: Kalynn showed evidence in as making progress towards her writing goals because she demostrated directionality when writing. When writing during the hearing and recording sounds in words assessment she was able to translate sponken words into individual phonemes in writing.

Measures

Kalynn was assessed in September and then again in November using the following tests:

• Running Records
• DAPPA
• Hearing and Recording Sounds in Words
• Spelling Inventory
• Concepts of Print
• Letter Identification
• Word reading
• Writing vocabulary

Animate your content and take it to the next level

Conclusion

Self Reflection

During this process, I learned a lot about administering assessments as well as using that data to plan an effective literacy intervention for my first-grade student. I learned about eight different assessments and had experience in triangulating the data from those assessments in order to determine goals for my student. I then had to use these goals to plan and adjust instruction in the literacy intervention. I also learned a lot about outside factors that influence student's performance, such as motivation, which would allow me to change my instruction to make it more engaging. To conclude, I now know more about assessing students, analying data, and carrying out an intervention.

Overall, the study showed that when implementing an early literacy intervention with explicit instruction of encoding and decording, there will be evidence of progress towards meeting goals related to skills of phonological awareness. This study also demonstrated the importance of establishing goals based on assessment data and planning instruction in the format of a literacy intervention in order for the student to meet those goals. This required adapting those lessons to meet the students ever-changing needs based on the progress monitoring.

References

Craig, S. A. (2006). The effects of an adapted interactive writing intervention on Kindergarten Children’s phonological awareness, spelling, and early reading development: A contextualized approach to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4), 714–731. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.98.4.714 Lipson, M. Y., & Wixson, K. K. (2012). To what interventions are students responding? The Reading Teacher, 66(2), 111–115. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.01110 Roberts, T. A., & Meiring, A. (2006). Teaching phonics in the context of children’s literature or spelling: Influences on first-grade reading, spelling, and writing and fifth-grade comprehension. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(4), 690–713. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.98.4.690 Rohde, L. (2015). The Comprehensive Emergent Literacy Model. SAGE Open, 5(1), 215824401557766. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244015577664