Abstract
<p class="apa">Although there is a growing consensus that, in reading acquisition, it is essential to provide children with learning activities that promote the development of reading cognitive schemes, particularly intra-syllabic related patterns, there is no agreement on which kind of syllabic schemes should be worked out in the first place. The main aim of the present study is to analyse the readings of preschool Spanish-speaking children showing the development of syllabic schemes in the early stages of reading acquisition. Basically, we analyse their responses in relation to their previous knowledge of Spanish grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) or alphabet knowledge. Our results show that children’s recognition and construction of syllabic schemes, from the very first steps in preschool reading acquisition programmes, is facilitated by reading activities presenting shell-nucleus syllabic patterns, for which the only requirement, although not indispensable, is to know the five or six Spanish vowel GPCs. This kind of activity seems to be more adequate than reading drills involving onset-rhyme syllabic analogies that require previous knowledge of consonant GPCs. The conclusion we have reached is that the development of onset-rhyme syllabic reading schemes shows a stronger relation to alphabet knowledge that shell-nucleus syllabic reading schemes, at least in the early stages of reading learning.</p>
Highlights
The essential task in reading education is to present printed texts in a systematic mode so that children cognitively structure spelling patterns (e.g., Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Ehri, 2005; Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1997)
We focus our study on the comparison between the following contrasting procedures: a) Reading acquisition activities centered in onset-rhyme syllabic schemes (De Cara & Goswami, 2002; Duncan, Seymour, & Hill, 1997; Goswami, 1993, 1999; Wyse & Goswami, 2008)
The analysis revealed a positive association of letter name knowledge and success in the ra reading task, i.e. children who know the r name are in a better position to read the word ra
Summary
The essential task in reading education is to present printed texts in a systematic mode so that children cognitively structure spelling patterns (e.g., Cunningham & Allington, 2003; Ehri, 2005; Gaskins, Ehri, Cress, O’Hara, & Donnelly, 1997). Discovery of the spelling patterns and phonemic segmentation is sometimes difficult for children to pick up on their own, but systematic sequential presentations of reading texts give children the opportunity to generate and apply their discoveries on the correspondence between a specific string of phonemes and a string of letters (Adams, 1990; Gaskins et al, 1997; Treiman & Rodriguez, 1999). It is traditionally assumed that children need to acquire a minimum knowledge of the alphabet in order to learn reading (Ecalle, Magnan, & Biot-Chevrier, 2008). Preschool reading activities are heavily orientated towards alphabet knowledge. The expected end result is that children would be able to recognize letters, understand that those letters have sounds, and would be able to blend those sounds together to make a word (Drouin, Horner, & Sondergel, 2012)
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