O n f e r e n c e

part of the decoding activities, i.e., 
Learn to Read
in the 
Starfall
website just focuses on 
blending without the balanced design of segmentation exercises. Moreover, the website 
only centers on onset rhyme awareness, without the balance of phonemic awareness 
which is of the most difficult linguistic complexity for language learners. Second, 
decoding exercises in the 
Starfall
website are limited to words of CVC structure without 
provision of the real world English complex letter-sound correspondences. Uhry and Ehri 
(1999) showed that the division of words into onsets and rimes is easier for words with a 
CVC structure but it does not hold true for shorter words. It was found that VC words 
that broke up words within the rime unit (
i-ce
) were more easily segmented than CV 
words (
s-igh
) that respected the onset-rime boundary. Finally, the design of decoding 
activities in the 
Starfall
website does not fit the phonemic awareness development 
continuum which is most predictive of reading success; i.e., it focuses on onset-rime 
blending without the consideration of the other phonemic awareness skills such as 
phonemic segmentation and phoneme manipulation. 
An alternative website which covers both the blending and segmentation skills, i.e., 
ABRACADABR
(
ABRA
)website is therefore desirable. In the following section, the 
discussion will be centered on the decoding activities, i.e., blending and segmentation 
exercises provided in the 
ABRACADABR
website. The main reason this study adopted the 
ABRA 
website is because it fits Chapelle and Jamieson
’s (2008) CALL
design criteria. The 
five criteria are as follows: 1) select CALL materials that teach the sounds and accents 
that are relevant for students; 2) choose CALL materials that explicitly teach English 
pronunciation skills; 3) provide opportunities for oral practice through interaction with 
the computer; 4) evaluate learners’ performance and provide feedback; and 5) help 
learners develop strategies for explicit online learning of oral language through the use of 
online reference tools.

---

-98- 
2014 CALL Conference 
LINGUAPOLIS
www.antwerpcall.be 
ABRA
is a website designed by 
The Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance 
(CSLP) in Canada, and it is a free and interactive literacy program designed originally for 
L2 early elementary school-
aged children’s
English learning in Montreal.
The story component of the website, designed to enable students to read for a variety of 
purposes, involves five different genres of folk and fairy tales, poetry, fiction, non-fiction, 
and multicultural. Each genre includes four to six stories, and each text has a reading 
model that allows students to follow and hear its pronunciation. Moreover, the activities 
include four different reading skills, ranging from word-level practice (e.g., letter-sound 
recognition, matching, blending, segmenting and word changing) to reading fluency 
development, comprehension development, and writing skills. Each item can be learned 
with different reading genres. This study focuses on decoding training in word-level 
practice, i.e., the auditory blending activity and auditory segmenting activity. 
ABRA
offers 
students a variety of reading materials and activities, provides teachers forms of video 
clips and animated demonstrations, and gives parents chances to engage in their 
children’s learning process. 
Researchers in Canada have conducted several randomized controlled trials to measure 
the 
ABRA
’s impact on students’ reading and decoding performance. It has been shown to 
enhance students’ literacy skills. 
Abrami, Cerna, Hipps, Jorgensen, and Savage (2005) 
conducted a pilot study with the 
ABRA
website in two Quebec schools. At pre-test and 
posttest, 72 participants were assessed on four skills: decoding, processing speed, word 
reading and comprehension. Group A focused on a progression from sentences to words 
to rhymes, group B focused on blending and segmenting activities, and group C (the 
control group) received the traditional classroom instruction. The results revealed that all 
three groups improved in decoding skills, and there were signs of moderate additional 
advantages for children in Intervention A. Likewise, all three groups improved both in 
processing speed and word reading. The modest differences were in reading 
comprehension at the posttest. Overall the results indicated that 
ABRA
had positive 
effects on students’ phonics learning, and could be incorporated into English teachers’ 
instruction.
Since 
ABRA
had significant effects on children’s sight word reading and phonological 
awareness, Abrami, et al. (2005) investigated the effects with 10 
ABRA
intervention and 
10 control classrooms across Canada. One hundred and fifty-two kindergartners, 229 1st 
graders, and 52 2nd graders came from suburban schools in Quebec, Ontario, and 
Alberta participated in the study. The control group received regular English Language 
Arts lessons while the experimental group received 
ABRA
instruction. The posttests took 
place after 10-12 weeks, and the results showed that children in the intervention 
condition outperformed those not using