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Article Excerpt
Abstract. This study compared literacy learning for kindergartners as 12 teachers read 10 popular alphabet books aloud, emphasizing meanings or phonemes, and used centers for independent practice with an alphabet book on audiotape or CD-ROM over a period of four weeks. Researchers taught half the teachers to read the books with an emphasis on phonemes represented by the letters and the other half to focus on meanings of words as the books were read. Within each meaning- or phoneme-emphasis group, teachers had students work with one of the alphabet books, Dr. Seuss's ABC, in a computer center with an animated CD-ROM, or in a listening center with an audiotape and print copy. A total of 152 kindergartners completed pre- and posttests measuring knowledge of vocabulary in the alphabet books, letter names, phonetic cue reading, and phoneme identities. Results for phoneme identities indicated a significant interaction between type of instructional emphasis and media practice. An emphasis on phonemes combined with practice reading the alphabet book while listening to the text on audiotape was significantly more effective than other treatment combinations. Statistically significant improvements from pre- to posttests on all measures suggested that alphabet books are useful materials for beginning literacy instruction.
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As teachers and researchers, we conducted this study to explore learning outcomes when kindergarten children listened to alphabet books read aloud by teachers with either a meaning or phoneme emphasis and practiced independently by reading along with an audiotape or the CD-ROM version for one of the books. Reading aloud has a long history and sound theoretical support as an effective classroom practice (Huey, 1908; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Teale, 1984) and, according to Beck and McKeown, "is probably the most highly recommended activity for encouraging language and literacy" (2001, p. 10). Research in the United States confirms that reading books aloud typically occurs daily across the elementary grades, but is most frequently practiced in kindergarten classrooms (Hoffman, Roser, & Battle, 1993; Lickteig & Russell, 1993).
For kindergarten children, alphabet books frequently are recommended as read-aloud materials because of their potential to explicitly focus attention on print that builds letter-sound knowledge and on vocabulary that develops oral and written language (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996, 1998; McGee & Richgels, 1990; Tompkins, 2001; Yopp & Yopp, 2000). For these reasons, Camp and Tompkins (1990) championed alphabet books as read-aloud materials for emergent and beginning readers, hailing the genre as the "soldier of literacy" (p. 298). In spite of the high praise and wide recommendations for alphabet books, we found little research that actually examined the effectiveness of this genre for enhancing literacy learning, and all of the existing studies were done with preschool, not school-age, children.
In their study of two preschoolers, Yaden, Smolkin, and MacGillivray (1993) reported that the children were unable to associate beginning letters with sounds, even after repeated oral readings of alphabet books by parents. Using videotapes of an adult reading an alphabet book to a child, Horner (2001) found increased attention to print and larger gains on letter naming tasks when 4-year-olds viewed child models asking questions about print rather than pictures or models asking no questions at all. In another study with preschoolers, Murray, Stahl, and Ivey (1996) showed that read alouds with alphabet books produced significantly greater gains in phoneme awareness than read alouds with other types of children's books.
Relationships between vocabulary knowledge and reading achievement have been well established (Herman & Dole, 1988; McKeown, 1985), and a number of studies have demonstrated significant increases in children's vocabularies as a result of reading aloud (Brabham, Boyd, & Edgington, 2000; Elley, 1989; Leung, 1992). Most alphabet books have rich arrays of challenging words and concepts, so it seems logical to promote them as vocabulary builders for children who are learning to read (Tompkins & McGee, 1993; Yopp & Yopp, 2000). It appears, however, that these suggestions are justified more by optimism than by empirical evidence. In an extensive literature review, we were surprised to find no studies investigating the effects of reading alphabet books aloud on vocabulary acquisition for either preschool or school-age children.
This lack of research support for the use of alphabet books in beginning literacy instruction prompted us to conduct this study. Finding no studies that examined how teachers can effectively use this genre, we decided to compare two types of instructional emphasis and media practice for reading alphabet books in kindergarten classrooms to see if they produced different effects on vocabulary acquisition and other knowledge necessary for children to learn and apply the alphabetic principle--that written letters systematically represent phonemes in spoken words (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1995). A considerable body of research indicates that children's awareness of phonemes at the onset of formal reading instruction is the single most important predictor of later reading achievement (Adams, 1990; Juel, 1988; Share, Jorm, Maclean, & Matthews, 1984; Stanovich, 1986). In a summary of reading research since 1975, the National Research Council concluded that knowledge of letter names might be an even stronger predictor of reading success than phoneme awareness (Snow et al., 1998). Results reported by Murray et al. (1996) showed that alphabet books positively affected these two learning outcomes for preschool children, and they provided a starting point for this comparison of instructional emphasis and media practice for reading alphabet books with kindergartners.
Murray et al. (1996) assessed letter name knowledge and phoneme awareness for 42 four-year-olds in three classrooms before and after the teacher read storybooks or one of two types of alphabet books. Each class heard one type of book read aloud for 15 consecutive school days. One experimental group listened to traditional alphabet books, such as Dr. Seuss's ABC, that presented both names and example words for each letter. The other experimental group listened to books, such as Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, that presented letter names but no example words. Children in the control group listened to narrative storybooks, such as The Cat in the Hat and Caps for Sale. (References for all children's books cited and used in this study are in the Appendix.)
Murray et al. (1996) found that both experimental groups and the control group made statistically significant gains in letter name knowledge. On phoneme awareness assessments measuring ability to blend and segment onsets and rimes, students who listened to traditional alphabet books with example words for each letter made significantly greater gains than those exposed to books with letter names, but no example words or to storybooks. The researchers also noted that all three teachers focused on meaning, whether they were reading storybooks or alphabet books. The two teachers who read alphabet books pointed to letters when they said their names but did not call students' attention to the letters' phonemic values, even when lots of example words afforded many opportunities for emphasizing sound-letter correspondences.
In the study reported here, we expanded on research questions addressed by Murray et al. (1996) in several ways. First, we recruited a larger number of children and teachers as participants and lengthened the treatment period by five days. We also limited the alphabet books read aloud to those with multiple example words for each letter and added a dependent variable measuring students' knowledge of vocabulary words repeated across several of the books. Instead of measuring children's blending and segmenting of onsets and rimes as an indicator of phoneme awareness, we assessed changes in whether they could match identical phonemes in two spoken words. To see how reading alphabet books in different ways might affect children's understandings of the alphabetic principle, we added a measure of ability to use first letters in words as phonetic cues for reading. We selected these measures of phoneme awareness and phonics because they correspond to knowledge most likely to be built by books in which each letter usually appears as the first letter of example words and in which phonemes are often exaggerated by alliteration.
To examine effects of teachers' instructional emphasis on meanings in alphabet books that was reported by Murray et al. (1996), we asked our teachers to read alphabet books...
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