ABSTRACT
El presente trabajo busca contribuir a la comprensión de las dificultades en la adquisición de velocidad lectora en niños que crecen en contextos de pobreza. Se realizaron dos estudios: el primero se propuso comparar los perfiles cognitivos de niños con y sin dificultad en el desarrollo de la velocidad en el reconocimiento de palabras. Participaron 68 niños de 6to grado de zonas vulneradas del conurbano bonaerense: 22 niños presentaban adecuada precisión pero baja velocidad lectora y 46 niños conformaron el grupo de comparación, con niveles promedio de precisión y velocidad. A ambos grupos se les administraron pruebas de conciencia fonológica, denominación rápida, memoria verbal y escritura convencional. Exceptuando la prueba de memoria, en el resto de las pruebas el grupo con baja velocidad lectora presentó desempeños inferiores a los del grupo de comparación. El segundo estudio buscó explorar en qué medida una intervención pedagógica permitía mejorar la velocidad lectora. Para ello, los "lectores lentos" del Estudio 1 participaron de una situación pre-test-intervención para promover el desarrollo de la velocidad lectora vía formación de representaciones ortográficas-postest. Los resultados del Estudio 2 mostraron que la intervención con lecturas repetidas y aceleradas de palabras modificó significativamente el tiempo de lectura de las palabras de entrenamiento. Los datos también sugieren que el trabajo con unidades subléxicas en la intervención permitió transferir la velocidad ganada en las palabras de entrenamiento a palabras de transferencia, palabras no trabajadas en las sesiones, pero con unidades subléxicas incluidas en las palabras de entrenamiento.
Reading speed is achieved based on automatic word recognition and, together with prosody, constitutes an essential link between word recognition and text comprehension. Despite the relevance of reading speed acquisition for success at school, a high percentage of children growing up in poverty contexts face difficulties in achieving automatic word recognition. Consequently, this paper aims to contribute to the understanding of difficulties in reading speed acquisition in children growing in poverty contexts. Two studies were designed. In the first study, in order to explore the origin of difficulties in developing word reading speed, a comparison of the cognitive profiles of children from low-in-come backgrounds with and without difficulties in this ability was carried out. In a previous study, norms were obtained for accuracy and speed in a word reading test. Participants were 168 6th grade children from several educational institutions attending children growing up in poverty contexts in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the present study, the same word reading test was administered to 96 6th grade children. Based on the norms obtained in the previous study, two groups of children were identified: a group who performed at or above the 50th percentile in reading accuracy but below the 30th percentile in reading speed and another groupper forming at or above the 50th percentile in both measures. The first group was made up of 22 children, and the second one, of 46 children. The remaining 28 children were not included in the study because they performed below the 50th percentile in reading accuracy. Additional tests measuring phonological awareness, rapid naming, verbal memory and word spelling were administered to children in both groups. Between-groups comparisons in these tasks showed that children with speed acquisition difficulties underperformed the other group in the tests tapping phonological awareness, rapid naming and spelling. These results suggest that the children in the group experiencing reading difficulties were still using the phonological route for word recognition. The second study aimed to explore whether a specifically designed educational intervention could enable children with low reading speed from the previous study to increase their reading speed. Both groups of children (with and without reading speed difficulties) were administered two additional reading tests: an experimental test comprising target words which would subsequently be included in the training study for the children with reading speed difficulties; and a reading test of additional words and pseudo words not targeted in the training study, but considered transfer items because they comprised sub lexical units that were included in the target words to be trained during the intervention. These same reading tests were re-administered as a post-test, after the reading intervention for the reading speed difficulties group. The training study aimed to promote reading speed via the acquisition of orthographic representations. The intervention involved two weekly individual sessions lasting 20 minutes each. Each child participated of a total of 15 sessions. Each session included repeated and accelerated reading of lexical units, as well as activities for promoting the analysis of sublexical units included in the target words and also present in the transfer pseudo words from the post-test. The comparison between the pre- and post-test performance of the training group showed a statistically significant increase in reading speed both of trained and transfer words, an increase that was not obtained for the comparison group. This result suggests that during the intervention children were able to develop orthographic representations of the trained lexical units, but also of the sub lexical units that were present in both the target and the transfer words. Educational implications from this study point to the importance of repeated and accelerated reading for increasing speed, a critical reading ability.
ABSTRACT
Resumen En este estudio se analizó el desarrollo de conocimiento ortográfico de niños en el marco de un programa de intervención de aulas educativas en el que participaron 74 niños argentinos que cursaban 3er grado de la escuela primaria y que fueron ubicados en dos grupos: 36 niños en un grupo de intervención y 38 en un grupo control. Con el grupo de intervención, se realizó una secuencia didáctica para promover la formación de representaciones ortográficas léxicas y sub-léxicas y el aprendizaje de reglas contextuales. La comparación postest entre grupos mostró un desempeño superior del grupo de intervención en la escritura de las palabras entrenadas. También se evaluaron ambos grupos en la escritura de palabras de transferencia, palabras no específicamente trabajadas en la intervención pero que compartían reglas ortográficas, sílabas o morfemas con las palabras entrenadas. Los resultados postest mostraron que el grupo de intervención escribió significativamente mejor que el grupo control las palabras de transferencia con las mismas reglas ortográficas contextuales pero no con las que incluían cadenas subléxicas idénticas a las de las palabras de entrenamiento. Se concluye que la intervención realizada benefició la transferencia de reglas contextuales pero no de representaciones ortográficas subléxicas para la escritura de palabras desconocidas.
Abstract This paper analyzed the acquisition of orthographic knowledge in 3rd grade, Spanish-speaking children. Participants were 74 Argentine children; 36 were included in an experimental group while 38 were part of a control group. The experimental group was engaged in classroom activities designed to promote the acquisition of context-sensitive correspondence rules and the establishment of orthographic representations of words, syllables and morphemes. Post-test comparisons carried out between the experimental and the control groups showed that the experimental group was significantly better in the spelling of all words trained in the program. Children were also evaluated in the spelling of transfer words, that is, words not specifically presented in the intervention program but which included the same rules, syllables or morphemes as the trained words. The experimental group outperformed the control group in the spelling of transfer words including the context-sensitive correspondence rules presented in the program. However, no differences were obtained between groups in transfer words comprising the trained syllables or morphemes. These results suggest that the intervention program was effective in promoting the transfer of newly acquired rules to non trained words but that the acquisition and transfer of syllables and morphemes may require additional processes.