ABSTRACT
Resumen El presente trabajo se propuso analizar la contribución de la comprensión de lenguaje oral y la velocidad y la precisión en la lectura de palabras en la comprensión lectora en lectores iniciales del español que crecen en contextos de pobreza urbana. Para ello, se evaluó a 31 niños de 3er grado que crecían en barrios socialmente vulnerables de la provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina, mediante pruebas de comprensión lectora, precisión y velocidad lectora, vocabulario y procesamiento morfosintáctico. Los resultados de la muestra total indican que la medida de comprensión lectora se asoció a las medidas de vocabulario, procesamiento de lenguaje oral, y velocidad y precisión en la lectura. En contraposición a resultados obtenidos en otras lenguas de ortografía transparente, el análisis de una regresión indicó que la comprensión lectora estuvo mayormente explicada por la medida de precisión y no de velocidad en la lectura de palabras. A fin de enriquecer el análisis de los datos, a partir de los resultados en la prueba de comprensión de textos se conformaron dos grupos de niños con diferente nivel de comprensión lectora: un grupo de niños con un nivel de comprensión lectora cercano a la media obtenida (21 sujetos) y un grupo de niños cuyo desempeño se ubicó en un desvío por debajo de la media en la medida de comprensión (10 sujetos). Los resultados de una prueba de comparación de medias mostraron que entre grupos de niños con diferente nivel de comprensión lectora las habilidades que se diferenciaron fueron las relacionadas al procesamiento morfosintáctico.
Abstract The present study aims to analyze the contribution of oral language and reading comprehension skills in early readers of Spanish who grow up in poverty context in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For this, reading comprehension, reading accuracy, reading fluency, vocabulary and morphosyntax processing were tested in 31 3rd graders. Full sample data analysis show that reading comprehension measures was associated with vocabulary, oral language processing, reading speed and accuracy. In contrast to results obtained in other languages with transparent orthographies, regression analysis shows that reading comprehension was mainly explained by reading accuracy and not by reading speed. In order to improve the data analysis, two groups of children with different levels of reading comprehension were selected: one group (21 children) whose level of comprehension was near to the average obtained and one group of children (10 subjects) with lower reading comprehension level. The results of a mean comparison test showed that in groups of children with different levels of reading comprehension, the skills that differed were those related to morphosyntactic processing.
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.