Silent reading

In order to assess silent reading a word chain test was used. For the Norwegian word split test, the standardized Norwegian version of the Wordchains test (Høien & Tønnesen, 1997) was used. It consists of 75 strings of letters, all made of four relatively common words. The Norwegian words were translated into Swedish and Danish. Some words had to be altered in the Norwegian test in order to find suitable Swedish and Danish words. The English

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Wordchains test (Miller-Guron, 1999) was used. The test consists of 60 strings of letters made of three or four words.

One point was given for each word string correctly split up.

3.3.0 Procedures

The students were first informed about the project by their teachers, next they received an information letter and the questionnaires. In the letter the participants were informed that these tests would also be used for older children, and that therefore some of the tests might be hard for them.

The classroom tests were administered first. This way the children got to know the examiner before being tested individually, they also got used to being in a test situation in a safe and familiar setting. A teacher was present during all classroom tests in Norway and Denmark, whereas 2 experimenters ran both the classroom and the individual session. All children were instructed to sit one by one during the classroom tests, and they only had a pen/pencil and the test booklet on their desks. For the computer-based tests, a smaller room or a not-used classroom was used. The entire computer-session was recorded, in order to be able to reconstruct the responses in case of a failure with the voice-keys that were used and to enable the scoring of the responses by a native speaker of the Scandinavian. For the classroom tests the children got two booklets. The tasks in booklet one were L1 spelling, L2 spelling, L1 word chains, and L2 word chains. Booklet two contained the orthographic learning task, the visual memory task, and the memory of order task. There was time for a short break after finishing booklet one. The computer tasks were administered in the following order; L1 word reading, L2 word reading, non-word repetition, L1 vocabulary, L2 vocabulary.

3.3.1 Questionnaires

The children and their parents were asked to fill in questionnaires approximately two weeks before the test started.

26 3.3.2 Reading and Spelling

A native speaker of the different L1s prerecorded instructions, and all the words. First the target word was read, next a sentence in which the target word was used in a natural setting, and finally the target word was reread. The children were instructed to write the word on the empty line in the sentence next to the word’s number. The same procedure was followed when the participants were asked to spell English words, this time the words were read by a native speaker of English. Five warm-up words were given, before the participants started spelling 40 L1 words. The same was done for L2. The participants were instructed to have a go at words they were not absolutely sure of how to write. To make sure all the participants had enough time to write all the words, the examiner did not move on to a new word before all the children had raised their hands to signal that they were done.

The reading test was conducted individually in a room at the school. A Mac-Book was used, and all computer-based tests were programmed in SuperLab 4.2. Accuracy and latency times for each word were measured. The children used a voice key/ microphone, and the voice key was used to detect the onset of a child’s pronunciation of a word. The experimenter pressed a key to register whether the response was correct or not. The session was recorded;

using Audacity, so that all errors could be classified later, also if something had gone wrong with the voice key reaction times could be measured in the Audacity file. As a warm up for the real experiment, five high frequency words were presented. This way the children were familiar with the procedure when presented with the test words. The children were instructed in their native language to read aloud each word as quickly as possible after it had appeared on the screen. All words were preceded by a beep cue. If a child made five mistakes in a row, the test was stopped. The L2 test followed the same procedures as the L1 reading test.

3.3.2 Vocabulary

The vocabulary test was given individually to the participants. On a data screen the

participants were first presented with 100 L1 words and next with 100 L2 words. Words of varying frequency were presented randomly. The children were instructed to press a green key if they knew the meaning of the word, and to press a red key when presented with words they did not know the meaning of. There was no time limit, so the children had plenty of time to read the words. However, the participants were encouraged to respond as quickly as they could.

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3.3.3 Phonological awareness

The Welsh words were presented to the children in SuperLab, and read by a native speaker of Welsh. All sixteen words were presented twice. After two presentations the children were asked to repeat the word once. The children were instructed to pronounce the word as accurately as possible. All responses were recorded on Audacity.