Strengthening reading precursors in pre-readers

Abstract

Several research studies have demonstrated the efficacy of interventions to improve reading precursors, leading to more successful reading acquisition. Interventions to develop these skills are especially relevant in contexts that show low levels of reading proficiency on national and international evaluations, as in the case of Peru. It has been detected that the Peruvian educational curriculum does not contemplate working on pre-reading skills before beginning to read. Thus, the objectives of this study are: (1) to design a set of research-based activities that can be integrated into the Peruvian curriculum to stimulate these skills; (2) to test this intervention; and (3) to find out how other variables associated with the individual (Age, Sex, ESEC, and Executive Function) could be involved in the changes observed in the study. The activities were designed based on the target competencies and skills of the Peruvian curriculum in the area of communication, starting with the teachers’ use of literary texts. The activities were carried out with a sample of 208 Peruvian five-year-old children, divided into an experimental group and a control group. The latter followed an intervention with the traditional teaching format. The results obtained by the two groups were compared, and to control the effect of other variables (Age, Sex, ESEC, and Executive Function) and find out the degree of variance explained by the program, a multiple regression analysis was performed. The results show that the experimental group activities improved the reading precursors more than the control group intervention, and the regression analysis confirmed that the intervention explained most of the found in the final assessment. We can conclude that teachers can incorporate activities that complement the official curriculum, in order to improve their students' proficiency without placing an additional burden on them.

Keywords: emergent literacy, early reading; reading instruction; early intervention; official curriculum; reading teachers; pre-readers.