Big Words

The Big Words project is a Phase I Steppingstones of Technology Innovations grant awarded to the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  The primary goals of Big Words are to develop a new instructional technology aimed at teaching multisyllabic word decoding and to conduct research to determine the effectiveness of the technology.
The Big Words instructional technology will be designed to teach students to attend to the connections between morphemes in words in their efforts to read and spell multisyllabic words. A morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning and includes forms such as prefixes, suffixes and base words. The students targeted for this study range from the upper elementary grades (ages 9-12) through secondary school and must read with comprehension and fluency at 2nd grade level. These are students who have learned to decode unfamiliar one and two syllable words using sound-by-sound and/or decoding by analogy strategies but struggle to read larger, multisyllabic words. The instructional lessons will focus on teaching the meaning and pronunciation of frequently occurring prefixes, suffixes and base words. Activities will include removing and adding prefixes and suffixes to base words, building multisyllabic words, using multisyllabic words to complete sentences, and practice reading words in meaningful connected text.
The Big Words instructional technology will have four main functions: interaction with the student, interaction with the teacher or parent, interaction with a database of words, and provision of instructional feedback. The coding tools used in programming will allow the Big Words program to teach new concepts and provide the important feature of carefully programmed dynamic instructional feedback rather than simple corrective or informative feedback in a practice environment.
The Big Words project is currently in the curriculum and software development phase.  The intervention phase of the project is scheduled to occur from January through June 2010. At that time, 100 students of different ages will be randomly assigned to one of the two treatment groups: an experimental group who receive instruction with the Big Words software, and a control group. Analysis of the research and revisions to the instructional content and/or technology will take place from July through December 2010.  Please continue to visit this site for updates as the project progresses.

Note: This research was made possible through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (#H327A080014) awarded to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Literacy & Disability Studies. However, the contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and endorsement by the federal government should not be assumed.