Do Beginners Learn to Read Function Words Better in Sentences or in Lists?

FIRST GRADERS PRACTICED reading 10 unfamiliar function words (i.e., might, which, enough). Half of the children studied the words embedded in printed sentences. Half studied the words in unstructured lists of words and then listened to sentences comprised of the words. Posttest measures revealed that the sentence readers learned more about the syntactic/semantic identities of function words, whereas list readers remembered their orthographic identities better and could pronounce the words faster and more accurately in isolation. Findings show that there are multiple aspects of printed words to be learned by beginning readers. Which aspect gets learned depends upon how the words are practiced. Results are interpreted to support a theory of printed word learning in which various identities of words become amalgamated in lexical memory as a consequence of reading experiences with the words.