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Catherine Penney

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Biography:

My research currently involves evaluation of a remedial reading technique which appears to be very effective in teaching correspondences between letter patterns and pronunciations. Having students rehearse associations between sequences of letters and their pronunciations for sub-word units such as syllables and rimes promotes the students' word identification and word attack skills, and improves reading omprehension. This method works for both normal beginning readers and older students with poor reading and spelling skills. Through the network, I hope to work with Aaron Finkenzeller, Linda Miller, Angela Mandich, and Carrie Dyck to develop a computer program that would implement my method to teach normal first-graders or older children with reading difficultiess to read, spell, and write a basic set of words. I am also interested in the linguistic and cognitiveps deficiencies that underly delayed acquisition of reading and spelling.

I would like to follow up previous research (with Annette Godsell) suggesting that poor readers have an impairment in echoic memory. Impaired echoic memory may lead to failure to develop complete and accurate phonological images of words which are then insufficient to support the phonological segmentation processes required for acquisition of reading.

Dr. Carrie Dyck and I are investigating phoneme discrimination in dyslexics and are relating this to reading achievement. All of the dyslexic subjects we tested made errors in phoneme discrimination, and phoneme-discrimination correlated with reading achievement. I have some data from a case study in which phoneme discrimination errors were directly related to errors in reading and spelling.

The language and culture of my heritage is passed on to me orally. it's a different way off learning than how I am taught at school. How do I keep my traditional culture alive while learning to read and being immersed in the majority culture?

Reading is the core of learning and staying in school . improving reading skills with young Aboriginal children can open up the doors to future prospects.

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