Effects of a Home Literacy Environment Program on Psychlinguistic Variables in Children from 6 to 8 Years of Age.

Marta Romero-González,Rocío Lavigne-Cerván,Marta Sánchez-Muñoz De León,Juan Francisco Romero-Pérez,Rocío Juárez-Ruiz De Mier,Sara Gamboa-Ternero

doi:10.3390/ijerph18063085

Marta Romero-González, Rocío Lavigne-Cerván + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18063085

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Abstract

(1) Background: the objective of this study was to improve certain psycholinguistic and cognitive skills that are fundamental to the development of the reading process, such as phonological awareness, reading decoding, vocabulary and oral narrative comprehension, through the introduction of an Home Literacy Environment Active (HLE(A)) program that involved 54 participants enrolled in the first and second grades of elementary school (from 6 to 8 years old) in the city of Malaga area. (2) Methods: The central task of the intervention program was for the child to read aloud to an adult in the family for between 10 and 15 min, four days per week. In addition, the school students were evaluated on four occasions, at the beginning and end of each academic year, using the Batería de Evaluación de los Procesos Lectores Revisada, Test para la Detección de la Dislexia en niños and Escala Weschsler de Inteligencia instruments. (3) Results: the results demonstrated the efficacy of the HLE(A) program in the improvement of psycholinguistic and cognitive variables measured and, consequently, to an improvement in reading learning and cognitive development. Ultimately, the scientific literature on the subject and the data from the study led us to suggest that it would not only be beneficial for HLE(A) programs to be instituted in early childhood education stage (up to 6 years of age), but that they should be continued after age 6, in elementary education.

Highlights

It was found that 86% of the parents who participated in the second phase subsequently began to carry out the literacy activity at least once per week and, focusing exclusively on the variables that this study addresses, the researchers found that the intervention groups obtained better results in the identification of letters and vocabulary
In order to verify the efficacy of the home literacy environment (HLE) (A) program in relation to the improvement of the variables, a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) analysis was performed and changes in the experimental factor were examined
The general aim of this study was to improve the reading performance of the sample by applying an HLE (A) program; we were able to observe this intervention through the variables phonological awareness, reading decoding, vocabulary, and oral narrative comof the data, that between the first and last evaluation—that is, after two academic years—

Summary

Introduction

Reading is an extremely complex, constructive and inferential process, in which the experience of the individual constitutes a determining factor in the reconstruction of meanings and the understanding of language, as they continuously create and check hypotheses throughout the reading act [1,2]. The importance of reading does not reside in a single aspect: because of it, human beings are able to acquire and modify schemes of knowledge, to train and enhance basic cognitive processes, to activate emotions and feelings, etc. Through the act of reading, the individual improves their cognitive and affective development, and, insofar as this supports learning, this higher psychological process and the mastery thereof have, over the years, aroused great interest in the educational field

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