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This study compared the early reading development of five-year-old children who were learning to read either English (an opaque orthography) or Welsh (a shallow orthography). The children were being educated in Welsh and English-speaking primary schools in Wales during their first year of formal reading instruction. Teaching methods in both schools emphasised phonics. The reading, letter recognition and phonological awareness skills of the children were tested at three points in the year (November 1998, March 1999 and June 1999). By March, the children who were learning to read in Welsh were performing better than the English-speaking group at word recognition. The English-speaking children showed some improvement in their ability to read regular words across the three test phases, but no significant improvement in their ability to read irregular words. The children learning to read in Welsh also performed better on a phoneme counting task in March and June than the English-speaking children. Both groups performed similarly on tests of letter recognition throughout the year. The results suggest that a transparent orthography facilitates reading acquisition and phoneme awareness skills from the earliest stages of reading development onward.

Llinos Haf Spencer reports on the use of the duster analysis statistical technique in nursing research and uses data from the Welsh Language Awareness in Healthcare Provision in Wales survey [...]

Spencer and Hanley (2003) showed that Welsh-speaking children aged between 5 and 7 years who were learning to read Welsh (a transparent orthography) performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than did English-speaking children living in Wales who were learning to read English (a deep orthography). In this study, the reading skills of these children were reexamined three years later, during their sixth year of formal reading instruction. The children learning to read English continued to perform poorly at reading low- and medium-frequency irregular words but no differences were observed in reading regular words or nonwords. These findings emphasize how long it takes to acquire a large sight vocabulary in English, but indicated that the reading skills of the majority of the English-speaking children had caught up with those of their Welsh-speaking counterparts. However, the poorest 25% of the English readers continued to perform much worse than the lowest performing 25% of Welsh readers on both words and nonwords. An underachieving tail of this kind was not observed in the reading performance of the Welsh-speaking group. Overall, these findings suggest that in the long term the detrimental effects of an opaque orthography are most damaging to the poorest readers.

The relationship between the development of reading skills and the consistency of the orthography (writing system) is investigated in a study that examines reading acquisition in children living in Wales. Performance of children learning to read Welsh (a transparent alphabetic orthography) on tests of reading and phoneme detection was compared with the performance of children learning to read English (an opaque alphabetic orthography). The children were tested during their second year of formal reading instruction at school when they were aged between 5 and 6 years, and again one year later. The children learning to read in Welsh performed significantly better at reading both real words and nonwords than children learning to read in English. The English readers made fewer phonologically based reading errors. The Welsh readers also performed better on a phoneme awareness task These findings support the claim that children learn to read more quickly in a transparent orthography, and provide further evidence tha t the consistency of the orthography influences the initial adoption of different strategies for word recognition., Most alphabetic orthographies, including German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian, are said to be 'shallow' or 'transparent' in that graphemes in these systems generally represent only one phoneme. However, some alphabetic [...]

Purpose: To examine how mobility and mobility impairment affect quality of life; to develop a descriptive system (i.e., questions and answers) for a novel mobility-related quality of life outcome measure. Materials and methods: Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. Participants were recruited predominantly from NHS posture and mobility services. Qualitative framework analysis was used to analyse data. In the first stage of analysis the key dimensions of mobility-related quality of life were defined, and in the second stage a novel descriptive system was developed from the identified dimensions. Results: Forty-six interviews were conducted with 37 participants (aged 20-94 years). Participants had a wide range of conditions and disabilities which impaired their mobility, including cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis. Eleven dimensions of mobility-related quality of life were identified: accessibility, safety, relationships, social inclusion, participation, personal care, pain and discomfort, independence, energy, self-esteem, and mental-wellbeing. A new outcome measure, known as MobQoL, was developed. Conclusions: Mobility and mobility impairment can have significant impacts on quality of life. MobQoL is the first outcome measure designed specifically to measure the impact of mobility on quality of life, and therefore has utility in research and practice to measure patient outcomes related to rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background The United Kingdom has led the world in the development of children’s palliative care. Over the past two decades, the illness trajectories of children with life-limiting conditions have extended with new treatments and better home-based care. Future planning is a critically under-researched aspect of children’s palliative care globally. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of innovative child and parent-held palliative care planning resources. The resources were designed to facilitate parent and child thinking and engagement in future planning, and to determine care preferences and preferred locations of care for children with life-limiting conditions from diagnosis onwards. These resources fill a significant gap in palliative care planning before the end-of-life phase. Methods Drawing on contemporaneous research on producing evidence-based children’s health information, we collaborated with leading children’s not-for-profit organisations, parents, children, and professionals. A set of resources (My Choices booklets) were developed for parents and children and evaluated using interviews (parents, children, professionals) and questionnaires (professionals) and an open web-based consultation. Results Parents and children responded in three ways: Some used the booklets to produce detailed written plans with clear outcomes and ideas about how best to achieve desired outcomes. Others preferred to use the booklet to help them think about potential options. Remaining parents found it difficult to think about the future and felt there was no point because they perceived there to be no suitable local services. Professionals varied in confidence in their ability to engage with families to plan ahead and identified many challenges that prevented them from doing so. Few families shared their plans with professionals. Parents and children have far stronger preferences for home-care than professionals. Conclusion The My Choices booklets were revised in light of findings, have been endorsed by Together for Short Lives, and are free to download in English and Welsh for use by parents and young people globally. More work needs to be done to support families who are not yet receptive to planning ahead. Professionals would benefit from more training in person-centred approaches to future planning and additional communications skills to increase confidence and ability to engage with families to deliver sensitive palliative care planning.