Children’s Story Reading: Its Effects on the Predictability of Reading and Writing in Pre-Academic Children

Abstract

Children’s Story Reading: Its Effects on the Predictability of Reading and Writing in Pre-Academic Children Elsy Cárdenas-García, María Antonia Padilla Vargas, Yolanda Guevara Benítez Abstract The term „predictability of reading and writing‟ refers to the knowledge and skills that pre-academic children acquire to “read” and/or “write” in the reading and writing events they are familiar with. The aim of this study was to expose pre-academic children to two different conditions of short story reading and to identify their differential effects on the predictability of reading and writing. Thirty children with a median age of 50 months participated in the study, divided at random in four groups by the type of intervention: GE1 (listening to the reading of the same short story), GE2 (listening to the reading of five short stories, a different one in each session), each one of them with its own control group (CG1 and CG2, manipulating the short story(s) heard by the corresponding experimental group without listening to them). Our results show that after the intervention participants in the experimental groups had a better performance than those in the control groups in including the basic elements of a story, the conventionality of their scribbles, and the complexity of the sentences used to retell the story. The differential effects of the type of exposure to the stories on the predictability of reading and writing are discussed. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jehd.v6n3a9