Influences of orthographic consistency and reading instruction on the development of nonword reading skills

Wimmer and Goswami (1994) report that seven-, eight-, and nine-year old English children had considerably more difficulties with a nonword reading task than German children who acquire an orthography with highly consistent graphen e-phoneme correspondences. In Study 1, seven-, eight-, and nine year old English children receiving a phonics instruction were presented with the same task and compared with the children tested by Wimmer and Goswami. Study 2 is a replication with different samples of English children receiving the standard eclectic approach combining both whole-word and phonics strategies, English children receiving a phonics teaching approach and German children who are taught via phonics methods and acquire a consistent orthography. Children from Grades 1 to 4 were tested. In both studies, the English phonics children read the nonwords with almost the same accuracy and speed as the German children. In Study 1, the English phonics children performed clearly better on nonword reading than the English standard sample. In Study 2, this difference was also evident but less marked. In Grade 1 English phonics as well as English standard children had clearly more difficulties with phonological decoding than German children indicating a relevant influence of orthographic consistency.