There is profound and long-standing debate over the role of explicit instruction in reading acquisition. In this research, we investigated the impact of teaching regularities in the writing system explicitly rather than relying on learners to discover these regularities through text experience alone. Over 10 days, 48 adults learned to read novel words printed in two artificial writing systems. One group learned spelling-to-sound and spelling-to-meaning regularities solely through experience with the novel words, whereas the other group received a brief session of explicit instruction on these regularities before training commenced. Results showed that virtually all participants who received instruction performed at ceiling on tests that probed generalization of underlying regularities. In contrast, despite up to 18 hr of training on the novel words, less than 25% of discovery learners performed on par with those who received instruction. These findings illustrate the dramatic impact of teaching method on outcomes during reading acquisition.

关于显式教学在阅读习得中的作用存在深刻而长期的争论。在这项研究中，我们明确地调查了写作系统中教学规律的影响，而不是依靠学习者仅通过文本经验来发现这些规律。在 10 天的时间里，48 名成年人学会了阅读用两种人工书写系统打印的新词。一组仅通过对新词的经验来学习拼写到声音和拼写到含义的规律，而另一组在训练开始前接受了关于这些规律的简短的明确指导。结果表明，几乎所有接受指导的参与者都在探索潜在规律性泛化的测试中进行了上限。相比之下，尽管对新词进行了长达 18 小时的培训，但只有不到 25% 的发现学习者的表现与接受指导的学习者相提并论。这些发现说明了教学方法对阅读习得结果的巨大影响。