Spelling and Meaning of Compounds in the Early School Years through Classroom Games: An Intervention Study

Implementing a scientifically based educational intervention in mainstream primary schools before and during COVID-19 era: Evidence from Greek-speaking children

BACKGROUND

While morphological awareness has been recognized as a fundamental skill in students' literacy acquisition, experimental evidence is still scarce, especially regarding studies during pandemic.

AIM

The aim of the study was to present a scientifically based educational intervention of morphological awareness which was implemented in two mainstream primary schools in Greece during COVID-19 era (2020-2021).

METHOD

Participants were 72 primary school students (3rd/4th Grades) who were divided into an intervention and a control group per class. All students were assessed via tests of intelligence, literacy and language before pandemic. The intervention took place during pandemic in the school classroom of the experimental groups and included a pre-test, a training program and a post-test. The experimental material comprised of compounds which pose particular difficulties to children in terms of spelling and meaning.

RESULTS

The results showed that the systematic exercise of the morphological structure of words increased significantly students' spelling and semantic performance, including those with low literacy performance.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings underline the importance and feasibility of implementing scientifically based educational interventions in mainstream education during COVID-19 era. Theoretical and practical issues concerning the implementation of hybrid models of educational interventions and scientific research in education are discussed.

Contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia: evidence from a transparent orthography

The goal of this study was to investigate the contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia in a transparent orthography, such as the Greek one. The sample consisted of 256 Greek-speaking children (2^nd grade: 32 dyslexic and 105 typical readers, 5^th grade: 28 dyslexic and 91 typical readers). Morphological awareness was assessed with three tasks, examining inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology. Reading fluency was evaluated at word, text, and silent level. The results indicated that dyslexic children both in 2^nd and 5^th grade face significant difficulties in inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology compared to their peers. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness significantly contributed to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. Among typical readers, results indicated that inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology had a small but significant effect on word, text, and silent reading fluency in 2^nd grade and derivational and inflectional morphology on text and silent reading fluency in 5^th grade, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. For dyslexic children, a moderate-to-large effect of inflectional and derivational morphology on text and word reading fluency was restricted to 2^nd grade. Overall, morphological skills may play a supportive role in reading fluency of Greek children in first and last elementary grades. On the other hand, for Greek children facing reading problems morphological skills appeared to have a strong role in reading fluency only in first grades. Our study provided some preliminary data for the dyslexics' ability of morphological processing as a scaffolding skill for reading fluency. Implications of these findings for education are discussed.

Dynamic assessment in spelling and morphological awareness in Greek: The case of a transparent orthography

BACKGROUND

Recent research is in favor of the use of dynamic assessment as an important method of combining assessment and intervention in a unified framework for typically and non-typically developing children. However, research is still sparse, in the evaluation of morphological awareness, especially for phonologically regular languages.

AIMS

This study aimed to investigate the role of dynamic assessment in the evaluation of morphological awareness in Greek children.

METHODS

Forty Greek participants (7-8 years old) allocated to an experimental (N = 21) and a control group (N = 19) were preliminary assessed on reading syllables/words, spelling words, vocabulary and morphological awareness. They were also evaluated on static assessments of spelling and word-formation of morphologically complex words, while only the experimental group was evaluated on dynamic assessments of the same tasks.

RESULTS

Children achieved significantly higher performance on the dynamic assessment tasks in comparison to their static ones. Correlations indicated that the degree of children's progress depended greatly on their initial literacy and language skills, while regression analyses revealed that static tasks made a unique contribution to their dynamic performance.

CONCLUSIONS

The results underline the role of dynamic assessment in the evaluation of morphological awareness in a phonologically regular language with rich morphology, such as Greek.