THE BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS APPROACH TO READING: PHONICS DISCRIMINATIONS 1. Benjamin B. Lahey, Dennis R. Weller, William R. Brown 2.

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1 200 Journal of Reading Behavior * Vol. 5, No. 3, Summer THE BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS APPROACH TO READING: PHONICS DISCRIMINATIONS 1 Benjamin B. Lahey, Dennis R. Weller, William R. Brown 2 Abstract Several investigators have successfully applied behavior modification techniques to educational problems. These investigators have followed a simple set of rules: (1) Analyze the problem area into its component parts. For example, reading is a global term for a wide range of component skills. (2) The objectives of instruction should be set in terms of these components and an instructional sequence of components should be designed in which the acquisition of each component is dependent upon the acquisition of the prior components. The acquisition of each component skill is produced through the systematic manipulation of aspects of the environment, most frequently operant response consequences. An example of this approach is provided in which subjects acquire a single phonics discrimination. In recent years, behavior modification techniques have been successfully applied to many areas of remedial education. For example, Bailey, Wolf and Phillips (1970) modified the study behaviors of predelinquents; Clark, Sherman and Kelly (1971) instituted appropriate syntax in the speech of severe retardates; Hall, Fox, Willard, Goldsmith, Emerson, Owen, Davis and Procia (1971) reduced the frequency of disruptive behaviors in an EMR class; and Whitman, Zakaras and Chardos (1971) trained severely retarded children to accurately follow classroom instructions. These changes which have proved so refractory to educational interventions in the past were brought about through the use of very simple techniques based on elementary principles of learning, most often operant reinforcement. The behavior analysis approach has also been applied to reading instruction. In dealing with severely deficient young readers, for example, Staats, Minke, Goodwin and Landeen (1967) were able to produce large increases in sight-word vocabularies in a short period of time, and Whitlock and Bushell (1967) were able to produce similar changes in reading rate. As applied to reading, this viewpoint advocates a three-step approach: 1 This research was partially supported by ONR contract: N C-O27O The excellent cooperation of the staff of the Naval Training Material Center and the Recruit Training Center, Orlando, Florida, is gratefully acknowledged. This paper does not necessarily represent the views and policies of the U. S. Navy. Dr. Benjamin B. Lahey is in the Department of Psychology, Florida Technological University, Orlando, Florida. Mr. Dennis R. Weller and Mr. William R. Brown are research assistants in the Department of Psychology, Florida Technological University, Orlando, Florida.

2 201 (1) Component Analysis. What we term "reading" is actually a complex set of many different behaviors. This set should be analyzed into its components which should be treated separately. Instead, we often treat such divergent behaviors as letter discrimination, phonics, comprehension as a single skill, especially in the use of composite test scores. (2) Sequencing. The components should be taught in a hierarchical sequence, with each step building on the next. For example, letter discriminations must be taught before sight-words. Each step should be small enough to be learned easily and must be fully mastered before moving on to the next step. This seems patently obvious, but is widely violated. (3) Manipulation. Changes in reading behaviors can be best produced by the application of learning principles. For example, correct oral readings of sight words may be followed by reinforcement, while it is withheld after, incorrect responses. This approach is well defined in Bijou, Birnbrauer, Kidder and Tague (1966). This paper presents an example of the behavior analysis approach in the remedial teaching of phonics to semi-literate adults. The technique is not compared to other instructional techniques in more than a passing manner because it would be premature to do so at this stage. Rather than comparing a heuristically constructed "behavior modification" system to other instructional systems in a wholesale fashion, instructional techniques should be experimentally derived for each reading component, the best sequencing strategy should then be experimentally determined, and only then should the system be compared to other systems. The population of this study was a group of U. S. Navy recruits who had been accepted into the service under an experimental program to train low-income, low educational achievement recruits. None of these recruits would have been accepted into the service under normal educational standards. At the time of the study, the subjects were assigned to an intensive six-week remedial education program designed to prepare them for the academic aspect of basic training. The study was carried out as a first step in the attempt to find efficient ways of teaching basic reading behaviors to this and similar populations. Subjects Method Four subjects were randomly selected from the recruit population. All subjects were in the first or second week of the remedial education program. Subject 1 was an 18-year-old White male with an AFQT of 30 (military intelligence test reported in percentile scores) and an entering Gates-McGinnitie Reading Test grade equivalent of 4.7. Subject 2 was a 19-year-old Black male with an AFQT of 19 and a Gates-McGinnitie grade

3 202 equivalent of 3.9. Subject 3 was a 22-year-old Black male with an AFQT of 15 and a Gates-McGinnitie grade equivalent of 3.2. Subject 4 was a 19-year-old Black male with an AFQT of 11 and a Gates-McGinnitie of 3.5. Setting The experiment was carried out in a small classroom in the remedial education complex. Each subject participated individually, seated across a table from the experimenter. A second experimenter was seated at the side of the table for the purpose of making inter-observer reliability checks. Behavior Definition and Reliability This experiment focused on the acquisition of a simple phonic discrimination due to the fact that the recruits had good oral vocabularies, but could not effectively read words on which they had not received specific sight-vocabulary training. Specifically, the study was concerned with the discrimination of instances for the pronunciation of long or short vowels. In words of the form: HAT KIT LOB the vowel is usually short, whereas in words of the form: HATE KITE LOBE the final "e" is silent and the vowel is usually long. This is one of the most regular and frequent phonic discriminations. For purposes of recording data, correct responses were defined as any pronunciation of the word in which the main vowel was said correctly and final "e's" were not pronounced. Mispronunciations of the consonant sounds were not counted as incorrect, but were corrected by the experimenter in the training phases. Such errors were very infrequent. There were no instances of a subject failing to attempt to pronounce a word. A total of seven inter-observer reliability checks were made during different- phases of the experiment on the different subjects. On these occasions, another observer independently recorded data during the entire session. This record was later compared with that of the experimenter. Per cent agreement was calculated by dividing the larger frequency of recorded correct answers into the smaller frequency. Reliability ranged from.93 to 1.00 with a mean of.98. Stimulus Items Six sets of 15 words each were used in the study. Each set consisted of three words each with a main vowel of a, e, i, o or u. One or two of the

4 203 three words for each vowel were short. All of the words were selected from a dictionary as being regular in pronunciation but infrequent in usage, to avoid including words that the subjects had been specifically trained to pronounce. All words were typed in capitals on 3 x 5 cards. Procedure The same within-subject, repeated measures procedure was followed for all subjects. The subjects were recruited by asking them to participate in the testing of an experimental instructional technique. Each subject was tested to make sure that he was able to say the proper sound of all long and short vowels on request before the procedure began. Prior to baseline the subjects were told: "We are going to be teaching you one of the rules that you need to know in order to pronounce words that you have never seen before - how to say a word the right way even though you don't know what it means. There are a lot of rules like this, but we are going to teach you just one of them. Before we start, I want to see how well you can pronounce the words on these cards. All of the words on these cards are real words, but you have probably never seen most of them before. They are unusual words, but they are all real words and they all follow the same rule. Do you understand? OK, I can't answer questions after this." Baseline 1. During Baseline 1, the cards in Set 1 were presented one at a time to the subject and the correctness or incorrectness of his response was recorded. If the subject did not attempt to pronounce the word, after a few seconds the experimenter said, "Make your best guess." The experimenter said nothing after the subject's pronunciation. After the first time through the cards, they were shuffled and the process was repeated for a total of three trials. Three other recruits who were correct on 12 or more of the words on the first baseline trial, were eliminated from the study. Rule. Following the Baseline 1 trials, the subject was told: "I'm going to tell you now what the rule is that you have to follow in order to pronounce each word correctly. If the word has an 'e' on the end like this (the experimenter wrote BITE), then the 'e' is silent and the vowel in the middle is long, as in 'bite.' If there is no 'e' on the end (the experimenter wrote BIT), the vowel in the middle is short, as in 'bit.' " The rule was then repeated using a different example. The words in Set 1 were then presented again in the same manner as in Baseline 1. Depending on the variability of the subject's behavior, from three to six trials were run in this phase. Points/Correction - Set 1. After assessing the effects of a verbal statement of the phonic rule, a phase was begun in which response consequences were manipulated. Before beginning, the subjects were told:

5 204 "From now on, I'm going to tell you when you're right or wrong. Each time you're right, you'll get a point (the experimenter demonstrated dropping a marble in a cup in front of the subject). When you get fifteen points, you get a mark on this sheet. When you get eight marks, you get a chit, good for a candy bar." When the subject's pronunciation was incorrect, no point was given and the experimenter said, "No. It's." Intermittently (after about 10% of the incorrect responses), the experimenter added, "The vowel is long (short) because there is (isn't) an "e" on the end of the word." This procedure was continued until the subject reached a criterion of two consecutive trials without errors. Baseline 2. Without any instructions from the experimenter, the conditions of Baseline 1 were reintroduced for four trials following the criterion trials. Points/Correction - Sets 2-6. In order to insure that the phonic discrimination that had been acquired was not specific to the single set of words on which training was given, training was repeated in the same way on five additional similar sets of words. In the current terminology of behavior analysis, these additional sets were used in order to demonstrate the acquisition of a generalized or generative response class (Guess, Sailor, Rutherford and Baer, 1971; Gark, Sherman, and Kelly, 1972)-responding in similar ways to the heterogeneous members of a stimulus class, even to those on which training had not been given. Total training time (excluding the Baseline and Rule phases) ranged from 1 to 1 Vi hours. Results As can be seen in Figure 1, the subjects correctly pronounced the words in Set 1 approximately 50% of the time during the first baseline. The statement of an algorithm for correct pronunciation of the words in the Rule phase improved performance only slightly. In contrast, performance on Set 1 improved quickly to the criterion of two consecutive correct trials after the introduction of response consequences in the first Points/ Correction phase. More importantly, the savings in acquisition from Set 1 to 6 suggests that the procedures produced a generalized acquisition of the discrimination. Three of the four subjects pronounced all of the words in Set 6 correctly without any training trials. The absence of a decrement in correct responding during Baseline 2 ("extinction") was surprising, but not without precedence in the training of simple reading skills (Staats, 1971). Interest was not focused on the extinction of the behavior, so few trials were scheduled for Baseline 2. This limits any conclusion about the "absence" of an extinction effect. The greater

6 t! 205 ss SS ss ii SS ss II J. SNOiivDNnNoaj imaao3 ra sil ss! SS ii SNoiivoNnNoad Figure 1. The Number of Words Which Were Correctly Pronounced in Each Deck of Fifteen Words During Each of the Experimental Conditions. (Each of the four graphs presents the within-subject, repeated measures data for one subject.)

7 206 the degree of resistance to extinction, however, the greater the procedure's educational usefulness. The high degree of similarity of the four within-subject replications should be noted as it points to the reliability of the procedure. Discussion Twelve years of formal education has produced virtually no acquisition of basic reading behaviors in these subjects. For them, traditional instruction was ineffective. This is possibly so because traditional modes of instruction focus more on what the teacher tells the student to do than on what the student does. While these methods may be moderately successful with most children, they are noticeably unsuccessful with this and other underachieving populations. This supposition is supported by the negligible improvement produced by verbal statements of the phonic rule in the Rule phase of the experiment. By contrast, as in many other behavior modification/precision teaching studies, the behavior of the subjects was quickly and effectively changed through a very simple procedure involving the systematic manipulation of response consequences. References BAILEY, J. S., WOLF, M. M., & PHILLIPS, E. L. Home based reinforcement and the modification of pre-delinquents' classroom behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1970, 3, BIJOU, S. S., BIRNBRAUER, J. S., KIDDER, J. D., & TAGUE, C. Programmed instruction as an approach to teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic to retarded children, Psychological Record, 1966, 16, CLARK, H. B., SHERMAN, J. A., & KELLY, K. K. Use of modeling and reinforcement to train generative sentence usage. Paper presented to American Psychological Association, Washington, D. C., GUESS, D., SAILOR, W., RUTHERFORD, G., & BAER, D. An experimental analysis of linguistic development: The productive use of the plural morpheme. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1968, 1, HALL, R. V., FOX, R., WILLARD, D., GOLDSMITH, L., EMERSON, M., OWEN, M., DAVIS, F., & PROCIA, E. The teacher as observer and experimenter in the modification of disputing and talking out behaviors. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1971, 4, SALZBERG, B. H., WHEELER, A. A., DEVAR, L. T., & HOPKINS, B. L. The effect of intermittent feedback and intermittent contingent access to play on printing of kindergarten children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1971, 4, STAATS, A. W. Personal communication, WHITMAN, T. L., AZKARAS, M., & CHARDOS, S. Effects of reinforcement and guidance procedures of instruction-following behavior of severely retarded children. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1911, 4,