Performance on Literacy Measures: Year 1

In Year 1, a number of literacy skills, mainly in ZF script, were assessed, including ZF letter knowledge, ZF reading accuracy before and after the intensive ZF course, ZF spelling, ZF school-wide literacy exam and the only CH task, namely character recognition. Table 4.1 presents the descriptive statistics of each literacy task in Year 1.

Table 4.1 Descriptive statistics of the literacy measures in Year 1

Measure Mean SD Min—Max N

ZF letter knowledge (37) 33.82 (91%) 3.01 21-37 95 ZF Reading accuracy_pr* (24) 9.03 (38%) 3.25 2-16 92 ZF Reading accuracy_po ** (24) 12.13 (51%) 3.40 5-20 94 Character recognition*** 51.78 18.48 0-95 91 ZF spelling (20) 12.15 (61%) 2.98 5-19 91 School-wide literacy exam

(100)

92.94 (93%) 6.51 69-100 96

Note: Maximum score and accurate percentage of mean score for each measure are presented in parentheses when they are available.

ZF Letter Knowledge

For ZF letter knowledge, the average correct rate was 91%, showing that most of the cohort has learned the majority of ZF letter-sound mapping rules before they enter primary school. In order to discover what processing challenges they met when naming a letter, an analysis of children’s errors was conducted. ZF letters with a high error rate (higher than 15%) are listed in Table 4.2. The type and rate of errors are also presented in the same table.

The most common errors made by the cohort may be categorized into three types: - Segment substitution: the correct letter name is replaced by another letter

name, or a similar segment is used in its letter name.

- Similar symbols: the correct letter name is replaced by the name of a ZF or English letter which looks similar to the target letter.

- Error on the sound structure level: the difference between the error and the correct answer is a missing segment, segments pronounced in reverse order, or a different level of grain size; children gave an incomplete letter name, or reversed the order of phonemes in the letter name, or added an extra medial before a syllable ending.

In addition, a large proportion of the cohort misarticulated the letter sound //. This was therefore not counted as an error during the scoring, since it is not atypical for this age group to misarticulate it. Only 1% of the responses to letter naming could be attributed to speech difficulties or were hard to classify.

ZF Reading Accuracy

For the ZF reading accuracy task, which was measured twice with an eight-week interval, the average correct performance increased from 9.03 (Pr) to 12.13 (Po) (see Table 4.1). The paired samples t-test showed this difference was both statistically and practically significant, with a high effect size: t (91) = 9.63, p <.001, d = 0.999. This result indicated that ZF reading accuracy did tend to improve after the ten-week intensive ZF course.

In addition, in the ZF reading accuracy tasks, two kinds of distracters were embedded: phono-lexical and visual distracters. The phono-lexical distracters are true words with a phonological and/or lexical similarity to the target. The visual distracters are

pseudo-words that are visually similar to the target. The descriptive statistics are presented in Table 4.3.

Table 4.3 Descriptive statistics of choice of distracters on ZF reading accuracy in Year 1

Choice of distracters Mean SD Min—Max N Pr_ phono-lexical 1.17 1.45 0-6 88

Pr _ visual .91 1.29 0-7 88

Po _ phono-lexical .96 1.44 0-7 90

Po _ visual .47 .93 0-5 90

Note: pr: before ZF course; po: after ZF course

Further analysis shows that children made fewer visual than phono-lexical errors, both before ZF course (Z = 2.08, p < .05) and after ZF course (Z = 3.58, p < .01) (data analysed using Wilcoxon signed-rank test). There was no significant difference

between the number of phono-lexical errors at before and after ZF course but the number of visual errors decreased significantly from before to after ZF course (Z=3.24, p < .01). The above results imply that the intensive ZF course might effectively strengthen children’s ZF reading accuracy in ZF orthography processing. The fact that recognition of ZF symbols improved within such a short period of time might be partly attributed to the high accuracy rate of ZF letter knowledge. Moreover, it may also be attributed to the relatively fewer strokes of each letter and consistent grapheme-phoneme mapping. Since it was evident that pupils were familiar at recognizing ZF words after the intensive ZF course, their correct ZF writing was expected.

ZF Spelling

The ZF spelling task comprising real and pseudo words in either regular or irregular spellings was the only writing task used in this study. In order to make sure children had developed sufficient writing skills to complete this task, it was not carried out until the 11th week. Five students who failed the task completely (with a score of zero) were excluded from the analysis. This group of students was from the same class and happened to sit close to each other. They misunderstood the instruction and wrote only onset letters, instead of whole words.

The average spelling accuracy was 61%. Table 4.4 presents descriptive statistical results separately for each of the four categories of items. The accuracy was

significantly better on true words than on pseudo-words (t (90) =7.12, p < 0.01), and for items with regular rather than irregular spellings (t (90) =2.57, p < 0.05). In addition, no writing error, such as unrecognised ZF or no ZF scripts, was found in the ZF spelling task.

Table 4.4 Accuracy of spelling on true vs pseudo-words, and on regular vs irregular spellings in Year 1

Measure (max) Mean SD Min—Max True word (10) 6.82 1.80 3-10 Pseudo-word (10) 5.33 1.79 1-10 Regular spelling (10) 6.33 1.90 1-10 Irregular spelling (10) 5.82 1.62 1-10

The above results show that for these children (average age 6.7), after intense learning of ZF, activating the top-down lexical knowledge (true words) to spell out what they heard was easier than the bottom-up processing (pseudo-words) relying on

phonological information and online sound-letter mapping process. The results suggest that children are not capable of generalising the spelling skill to novel words after the intensive ZF course. In other words, if the target of ZF training includes applying the spelling skill to write down novel words or utterances rather than only reading ZF words, then further training would be needed in order to achieve this. In addition, the difference in the accuracy rate between regular and irregular spellings is reasonable; regular spelling items were combined by serial letters in which

sound-letter was consistently mapped to each other, which was easier for the cohort than irregular spellings which required more item-specific lexical and orthographic knowledge to complete the correct spelling.

However, the above results might also be due to the different difficulty level. The lack of a lexical route or sound-letter mapping makes pseudo- or irregular words less familiar and harder.

School-wide Literacy Exam

The first school-wide literacy exam (see 2.3.4 for details) was intended to test the results of children’s ZF learning after the intensive ten-week course. All the items

were written in ZF and all students across classes took the same examination.

According to the result, the average accuracy was high, up to 93% (standard deviation = 6.51). Thus, most of the students performed well in this school-wide exam.