Spanish-speaking Primary Students Boost Reading Skills in an After-School Computer Program using Read, Write & Type
In a project funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, (NICHD), sixteen Spanish-speaking 6-7 year olds attended an after-school class for 60 hours using the Read, Write & Type Learning System. Their progress in reading was compared to that of 16 comparable controls who either went home after school, or attended day-care or after-school tutoring. All 32 students were struggling to read and were in the lowest 40% of the class on reading scores. The groups were randomly assigned. Their home language was Spanish, and their Quick English Start (QSE) scores classified them with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Mean QSE scores for the RWT group were 62 and for the Control Group were 65. At this school, primary students were receiving instruction in English with support in Spanish. All the teachers were bilingual but used primarily English in class except for brief clarification in Spanish.
Read, Write & Type (RWT), is a 40-level software adventure that provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, reading, writing, typing, and word processing. The RWT Learning System provides systematic instruction in all 40 phonemes while children sound-out and spell hundreds of words, phrases, and engaging stories. A second CD monitors progress and takes students to appropriate practice if they are not quite ready to move to the next level.
The RWT group received 60-70 hours of instruction and all 16 students finished the 40 levels of the program. Classes with two teachers and one aide ran for one hour every day after school, 5 days/week. They used the new version of Read, Write & Type which can be set to provide Help and Instructions in Spanish. Spanish Help is optional and can be accessed by clicking on a Yellow Balloon. Spanish Instructions are provided anytime new instructions are provided in English. (When students are introduced to a new phoneme, or new concept — for example, when they are told that names start with capital letters, and are shown how to use the shift key to make a capital — all the instructions are in both English and Spanish).
Classes started with warm-ups on the floor. Teachers used the Read, Write & Type Learning System lesson plans to structure the warm-ups. Students were introduced to a new Storyteller character and the sound that Storyteller represents. They worked on naming pictures that they would encounter in the computer program.. They generated sentences with the picture words. They analyzed the beginning, middle or ending sound of the words. They thought of other words with the same beginning sound. They discussed new vocabulary words. They practiced using the correct fingers on the paper keyboards as they sounded out each phoneme (chanting aloud in unison) in dictated words or short phrases like FAT CAT or RED JET.
Then students spent about 30 minutes at the computer progressing through the 40 levels of the Read, Write & Type CD. After every 4 phonemes, they used the Spaceship Challenge CD to play games that assessed their progress in Phonics, Spelling, and Reading Comprehension. If their scores indicated that they were not ready to move to the next level, they clicked on the Bonus Blimp which took them automatically to activities they needed to practice before trying to pass the Spaceship games again.
Students were tested before and after RWT with Woodcock-Johnson Word Attack (reading nonsense words) and Word Identification (reading words) in both Spanish (Munoz) and English.
| Spanish | Spanish | English | English | |
| Word | Word | Word | Word | |
| Attack | ID | Attack | ID | |
| RWT Group | ||||
| Before | 10.4 | 21.1 | 7.18 | 23.6 |
| After | 16.9 | 27.8 | 16.7 | 33.4 |
| Control Group | ||||
| Before | 10.8 | 20 | 7 | 25 |
| After | 14.4 | 24.8 | 12.6 | 29.6 |
Data were analyzed using an analysis of covariance to see if the posttest scores were significantly different when the pretest on that measure was used as the covariate.
The RWT group showed significantly greater improvement on the English Word Attack (p < .02) and English Word Identification (p< .01), suggesting that an after-school program using the Read, Write & Type Learning System can be very effective at improving reading scores significantly for LEP primary students who are struggling to read.
Because students received no direct instruction in Spanish reading skills, a more surprising finding was that the RWT group also improved more on the Spanish Word Attack (p<.01), suggesting that the development of phonemic awareness and phonics skills in English may affect those skills in Spanish as well. Spanish uses the same alphabet and is more phonetically regular than English, although a number of the phonemes, particularly vowel sounds, are different. But learning to segment words into their component phonemes (phonemic awareness) is the same process in both languages and one of the critical steps to reading.
Research results:
Research with ESL Students
Florida State University
The Writing Wagon Project
Family Literacy Project
Downer and Springer Elementary Schools
Back to Main Research Page
News & Reviews