Dificuldades e potencialidades nas competências pré-leitoras e hábitos de leitura familiar
: um estudo exploratório com um grupo de crianças do ensino pré-escolar

  • Elvira Manuela Almeida Santos (Student)

Student thesis: Master's Thesis

Abstract

Family and pre-school education are privileged settings to promote the development of pre-reading skills, in which research papers in this field of study indicate these as prerequisite conditions for the initial stages of acquiring reading and writing skills in young children. This study attempts to procure and understand in a perspective of exploratory descriptive, how the pre-reading skills are influenced by the child’s school settings, especially by pre-school education and the child’s family environment. This was our explicit objective to detail the existing relation between the child’s family reading habits and the reading skills attained in a group of 17 young children who were enrolled in the last year of kindergarten in an IPSS in the district of Póvoa de Varzim. Structured questionnaires distributed to parents (adapted from Viana, 2002) and Teste de Identificação de Competências Linguísticas (T.I.C.L.; Viana, 2002; 2004) were the basis for the collection of our research information. The results of these questionnaires indicate that the majority of the children were enrolled in pre-school education during 3 consecutive years and the majority of the parents of our research group concluded pre-secondary school education. In respect to the families reading habits, a large percentage of the families possess on average 11 to 50 books, half of the participating children request every day reading time, and only a small fraction of the participating children ask every day for storytelling. In respect to the frequency of the reading habits of the parents of our participants, the results show that only a small number of parents read at home. The reading sources of these families use magazines, by the mothers, and newspapers by the fathers. The resulting profile of the linguistic skills of our participants, suggest that the children who demonstrated enhanced lexical progress also recognize a greater number of words. We concluded that in the first category, the participants obtained a greater number of correct answers (Objetos and Verbos) and in the following categories (Categorias, Funções and Opostos) exhibit a lower percentage of correct answers. The Graus de Adjetivos catogory presented the greatest number of incorrect answers and the Concordância Género/Número catogory achieved the greatest number of correct answers. There were an expressive number of correct responses in the area of auditory memory, specifically in the Sequencialização Narrativa category. The results also indicated our participants revealed minor difficulty in segmenting words and syllables in comparison with identifying the first and last auditory word sounds. Lastly, we may also remark in respect to our results, that the participants who demonstrated superior prereading skills are the ones who: are enrolled in day care and kindergarten education; the parents concluded the pre-secondary school education or secondary school education; show daily home family reading habits and possess the greatest number of books, therefore, family reading habits and its frequency at the pre-school seem to be important factors to favour the early development of reading and writing skills in young children.
Date of AwardOct 2012
Original languagePortuguese
Awarding Institution
  • Universidade Católica Portuguesa
SupervisorLúcia do Rosário Cerqueira de Miranda (Supervisor)

Keywords

  • Reading and writing
  • Reading habits
  • Family
  • School
  • T.I.C.L.

Designation

  • Mestrado em Ciências da Educação

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