ABSTRACT
Resumen En las últimas décadas han surgido distintas iniciativas de alfabetización familiar para contribuir al desarrollo de las habilidades de lectura y escritura a través de experiencias lingüísticas tempranas de alta calidad, que compensan las brechas de origen socioeconómico en la población infantil. Este estudio da cuenta de las mejoras obtenidas por estudiantes chilenos de los dos últimos años de preescolar (prekindergarten y kindergarten) de nivel socioeconómico bajo, cuyos padres y/o cuidadores asistieron a un programa de talleres para implementar actividades de lectura de cuentos y juegos verbales compartidos en el hogar. Usando un diseño cuasi experimental se constató que aquellos niños cuyos padres asistieron a los talleres de habilidades de alfabetización obtuvieron mejoras significativas en dos habilidades de alfabetización: la competencia narrativa y el reconocimiento del alfabeto. Estos resultados fueron significativamente superiores a los de sus pares cuyos padres no participaron de los talleres, lo que sugiere que programas de intervención en el ambiente familiar permiten fortalecer habilidades de lenguaje y de alfabetización de los niños, contribuyendo a mejorar la condición de quienes ingresan al sistema escolar con mayores desventajas por su situación de vulnerabilidad.
Abstract Several family literacy initiatives to promote early reading and literacy skills have emerged in the last few decades. These initiatives provide high-quality linguistic experiences that compensate for socioeconomic gaps among young children. Among other activities, family literacy programs provide families with books, strategies, and other materials that allow them to engage in meaningful linguistic interactions, enhance vocabulary and syntax development, and build conceptual knowledge through conversations about stories, rhymes, and other printed material. Children's ability to construct narrative discourse from stories and picture books that have been explored and discussed with adults is of particular importance. For example, converging evidence demonstrates that children who can produce coherent narrative discourse have less difficulty learning to comprehend texts in school. Similarly, facilitating children's interaction with written text through shared reading and dialogue over printed material has proven to facilitate alphabet knowledge acquisition, a skill that later facilitates learning to read and write in school. This study discusses the gains of low socioeconomic background Chilean students ages 4 to 6, whose parents enrolled in family literacy workshops to implement read aloud and language games at home. The purpose of the workshops is to provide parents and caregivers with a structured, evidence-based framework with the purpose of promoting literacy and socioemotional development among children. Parents and other caregivers who volunteered to participate in the program attended 12 biweekly workshops where they learned and engaged in shared reading, oral interactions and language games at home with their children. These activities were modeled by coaches, and parents later practiced them and received feedback. Each family received books and games at every workshop session, and these materials were utilized by them when they read to their children. Using a quasi-experimental design, it was possible to see that, although both groups increased their narrative and alphabet knowledge skills over the 12-week period, students whose parents attended the program had significantly higher scores on a narrative skills task and alphabet knowledge than their peers whose parents did not. As expected, older children in the treatment group outperformed their younger peers in narrative skills. In terms of alphabet knowledge, the children in the treatment group nearly doubled the scores of those in the control group, suggesting that the interactions and language games facilitated the acquisition of this kind of knowledge. These findings suggest that well-structured, evidence-based family literacy intervention programs can strengthen children's language skills, particularly among those who enter school with lower literacy levels given their vulnerability status. In high-poverty contexts as those of most Latin American countries, family literacy programs are an important asset to narrow the learning gaps prior to school entry.
ABSTRACT
La investigación sobre las prácticas de enseñanza de los educadores ha puesto de relieve la importancia de las cogniciones que subyacen a las prácticas pedagógicas. El conocimiento práctico de los educadores define el conocimiento que generan los educadores mismos, como resultado de la integración y mutua influencia de fuentes teóricas y prácticas y que orienta su quehacer en el aula. Esta noción ha sido aplicada para abordar el conocimiento de los educadores sobre las diversas dimensiones que integran su trabajo profesional. El objetivo del estudio que se presenta fue examinar las dimensiones del conocimiento práctico para la enseñanza del lenguaje oral y escrito evidenciadas por estudiantes de educación inicial en práctica final, a través de la elaboración y explicación de mapas conceptuales. Participaron 26 estudiantes de ocho programas universitarios de formación profesional de Santiago (Chile). Los resultados de este estudio cualitativo descriptivo mostraron una mayor representación de tres de las seis dimensiones examinadas: conocimiento de la materia (lenguaje oral y alfabetización inicial), conocimiento de estrategias pedagógicas para su enseñanza y conocimiento de los niños a su cargo. El conocimiento del desarrollo y el aprendizaje en la infancia, de los propósitos de la enseñanza de esta materia y del currículum fueron representados en menos de la mitad de los mapas conceptuales. Se analizan estos resultados desde la perspectiva de la investigación reciente acerca de la enseñanza del lenguaje oral y la alfabetización durante los primeros años y la formación profesional de los educadores a cargo del nivel inicial.
Teachers' practical knowledge has become an increasingly relevant issue for educational research during the last decades. The concept of practical knowledge refers to the cognitions that underlie to teachers' actions, including teachers' knowledge and beliefs and attempts to grasp the knowledge and skills that are "unique to the teaching profession." Insights into the categories that constitute teachers' practical knowledge have suggested that it is a multi-dimensional concept that entails several dimensions: knowledge of student learning and development, subject matter, purposes and goals for teaching the subject, curriculum, instructional strategies (Beijaard & Verloop, 1996; Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). As part of their professional development, teachers need to know about language and its relevance to support general cognitive development and specific subject matter competencies. A great deal is known about how young children learn language and literacy and how their learning can be supported in the educational context. Literacy is a secondary system that depends on oral language as the primary system, so effective early childhood teachers need to know a good deal about language and literacy in order to organize learning opportunities for children during the first years of life. Early childhood teachers who have better training show better educational practices, more appropriate to children's development, are more sensitive to their needs and show more informed understanding of appropriate educational practices (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). This study aimed to examine the practical knowledge evidenced by prospective early childhood teachers in their last year of preparation to teach language and early literacy to children from 0 to 6 years. 26 prospective early childhood teachers in their final professional practice, from 8 university teacher education programs located in the city of Santiago - Chile (2-4 students from each program). Data were collected through the elicitation and verbal explanation of concept maps (Novak, 2008; Cañas, et al., 1997; Rovira, 2003) a procedure used in previous studies in which teachers identify and relate concepts considered important for teaching, organizing them into a schema (Meijer, Verloop, & Beijaard, 2002). A descriptive qualitative design based on the Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 2002) was conducted. Results evidenced the majority of conceptual maps included three of the six dimensions examined: knowledge of subject matter (oral language and initial literacy), knowledge of pedagogical strategies to teach this subject matter and knowledge of children. Phonology and phonological awareness were identified as the most relevant learning goals in the early years and activities like phonological segmentation as appropriate practices to reach them. Vocabulary was also identified as a relevant goal and different kind of texts, particularly children stories as important pedagogical resources. Knowledge of subject matter and pedagogical strategies to teach language of literacy was supported by recent research base, even tough, schemas and explanations did not evidenced the complex integration of language and literacy learning, oral language and literacy were presented as different skills, that had to be taught at different ages and using specific pedagogical strategies. Knowledge of children and their context was also considered in most of the conceptual maps, but there was no evidence of a systematic assessment of children strengths and difficulties, in order to organize the learning opportunities. This research expands international evidence on teachers' practical knowledge, focusing on prospective early childhood teacher education, which has not been examined before. According to these preliminary results, the early childhood teacher education programs, recognized by a panel of experts as the best of the country, are not preparing their students to address children needs. More research is needed in order to obtain a more complete picture of early childhood teacher education to teach language and literacy.
ABSTRACT
This article presents the results of a follow-up study of 262 low socio-economic children between the entry to the first grade to the end of third grade. Children were assessed with several psycholinguistic tests at the moment of their entry to first grade and reassessed in reading at the end of each grade. Phonological awareness of the first phoneme, knowledge of the alphabetic letters and recognition of some written names, predicted reading and differentiated significantly between children with high and low performance in reading in first, second and third grade.
Este artículo muestra los resultados obtenidos en un estudio de seguimiento de tres años, de 262 niños de estatus socioeconómico bajo que cuando ingresaron al primer año fueron evaluados en algunos procesos psicolingusticos. Los resultados muestran que el reconocimiento del primer fonema de las palabras, la identificación de algunos nombres propios y el conocimiento de algunas letras del alfabeto predicen significativamente el rendimiento de la lectura en el primero, segundo y tercer año, y discriminan entre niños con alto y bajo rendimiento.