Importance of prosodic awareness when learning how to read in primary school students (Importancia de la conciencia prosódica en el aprendizaje de la lectura en estudiantes de educación primaria)

Abstract

Studies in recent years have shown the importance of phonological skills when learning how to read and treating reading difficulties. More recently, research has shown the importance of suprasegmental skills in reading acquisition. However, in spite of this evidence, there is very little research in Spanish aimed at identifying these skills' influence on the reading process. The objective of this study was to analyse the connection between suprasegmental phonological awareness and reading skills in a group of 323 students aged eight and nine. Measures of reading words and pseudo-words and syntactic and textual reading comprehension were collected along with suprasegmental skills. The results show that suprasegmental skills show significant linkage patterns with reading skills. RESUMENLos estudios de los últimos años han demostrado la importancia que las habilidades fonológicas presentan en el aprendizaje de la lectura y en el tratamiento de sus dificultades. Recientemente nuevas investigaciones han constatado la importancia de la conciencia prosódica en la adquisición de la lectura. Sin embargo, a pesar de estas evidencias, son muy escasos los trabajos efectuados en español orientados a identificar la influencia que las habilidades prosódicas presentan en el proceso lector. El objetivo del presente estudio era analizar la vinculación que la conciencia fonológica suprasegmental presenta en las habilidades lectoras en un grupo de 323 estudiantes de ocho y nueve años. Se recogieron medidas de lectura de palabras, pseudopalabras, comprensión lectora a nivel sintáctico y textual junto con las habilidades suprasegmentales. Los resultados ponen de manifiesto que las habilidades suprasegmentales muestran patrones de vinculación significativos con el aprendizaje lector.

Effects of the development of reading comprehension questions on learning improvement

“…It has been found that people are born with a predisposition to pick up the rhythmic features of the mother tongue (Cutler & Mehler, 1993), which helps to segment the speech continuum into words, facilitating access to lexical representations. The influence of prosodic processing on reading skills has also been demonstrated (Goswami et al, 2002;Gutiérrez-Fresneda et al, 2021).…”

“…In other words, reading comprehension is understood as a deductive process in which the reader uses the clues in the text to interpret the meaning that the author is trying to convey. Thus readers are not passive subjects, but use their own knowledge by interacting with the text, which allows them to construct new meanings (Gutiérrez-Braojos & Salmerón, 2012;Gutiérrez-Fresneda et al, 2021;Pascual-Gómez & Carril-Martínez, 2017).…”

“…One of the objectives in the language teaching-learning process is the comprehension and delivery of coherent and well-structured messages, using linguistic and non-linguistic resources. In this sense, in relation to reading, the appropriate use of prosody is of vital importance because, as language is an communication system in which sounds are integrated to convey a message, mastering adequate fluency facilitates expressiveness, which is a fundamental means of understanding and achieving efficient communication (Gutiérrez-Fresneda et al, 2021).…”