Habilidades y conocimientos constitutivos de la alfabetización temprana: semejanzas y diferencias según el entorno social y las oportunidades educativas

Abstract

Dada la relevancia del desarrollo temprano de los conocimientos o habilidades considerados precursores de la alfabetización, resulta fundamental, para la elaboración de propuestas pedagógicas, identificar aquellos aspectos en los que es necesario focalizar dichas propuestas. En este sentido, el estudio que se informa abordó la incidencia del medio en las habilidades tempranas de lectura y escritura en tres grupos de niños de diferente procedencia socioeconómica (niveles socioeconómicos medio urbano, bajo urbano ybajo rural). Los niños respondieron a 11 pruebas que evalúan las siguientes variables precursoras de la alfabetización: Habilidades de procesamiento fonológico, Conocimiento de las correspondencias, Habilidades de discriminación visual de letras y palabras, Habilidad de lectura de palabras en contexto, Capacidad de reconocimiento de acciones de lectura y escritura, Formas tempranas de escritura, Conocimiento de lenguaje técnico y Manejo de libro. Los resultados obtenidos señalan que existen diferencias entre los grupos en las tareas implicadas en el reconocimiento de lenguaje técnico, en las de conciencia fonológica y en las formas de escritura. Sin embargo, no se hallaron diferencias entre los niños de los distintos sectores socioeconómicos evaluados en las tareas de discriminación, manejo de libro y reconocimiento de acciones de lectura y escritura. En concordancia con el modelo evolutivo de Nelson (2007), los grupos muestran un desempeño similar en conocimientos que responden a procesos perceptivos básicos y difierenen aquellos que la investigación ha demostrado que requieren de la intervención de un adulto alfabetizado.

Due to the fact that early literacy skills are crucial for reading and writing learning process, it is important to identify them in order to design teaching activities. Most of the former literacy studies have been carried out with middle class children and show that reading and writing learning process begins very early at home. The rate and the way reading and writing are developed is highly related with parents educational level and the kind and frequency of the literacy activities they propose. There are differences between social groups with regard to these activities that may cause knowledge differences at early age that may explain reading and writing learning process failure in low income children. From a developmental perspective there have been numerous studies focused mainly on literacy learning before formal teaching of reading and writing in school. These researches tempt to explore and describe the concepts, knowledge, skills and early actions of reading and writing as well as the social context where these developments occur. In the framework of these observations, the aim of the present study was to compare early reading and writing skills in three groups of children from different socioeconomic environment. From theoretical and methodological point of view we have take in account a cognitive psychology perspective to explore those variables considered early literacy skills such as phonological awareness, early writing skills among others as well as we have adopted as teaching and learning process framework Vigotsky's zone of proximal development as well as Bruner's scaffolding. The groups were described according to different variables such us age (measured up to May, 30th), sex and socioeconomic level. In order to measure the last variable, parents education level and job were considered according Sartú (1992) occupational scale. Using this variables three groups were selected: Group A was formed by 20 children mean age 5.5-year-olds from middle urban income families who attended a public kindergarten school situated in a middle class neighborhood. Group B was formed by 19 kids mean age 5.3-year-olds from low income families who attended to a public kindergarten school in a low income urban neighborhood. Group C was formed by 17 children mean age 5.3-year-olds who attended a public kindergarten school from a low rural income area. Kids were assessed with 11 tasks: Phonological awareness, Letter-sound correspondences, Differences between letters, Words from pictures, Reading words in context, Recognition of writing and reading activities, Early reading and writing performance, Technical vocabulary knowledge, proper usage of books was tested. The results of this study provides empirical information on the early literacy pattern of learning process of Spanish-speaking children as well as differences in knowledge and skills involved in this process between children from different socioeconomic groups. Differences between the three groups were observed in technical vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness tasks performance. There were no differences between socioeconomically groups in distinguishing letters and words from pictures, recognizing writing and reading activities and proper using of books. According to Nelson (2007), children have a similar performance in those activities based on basic cognitive skills and differ in the ones that involve adult's instruction. The similar performances of the groups tested seems to indicate that the knowledge involved in early literacy process is develop in a sequence characterized by an emerging knowledge about writing in the social environment. The fact that children did not grasp a complete competence in one knowledge before reaching it in other later ability shows that literacy acquisition is characterized by an overlapping development of different abilities and knowledge.