Transition from Letters to Words: Meaningfulness in Preschoolers’ and First Graders’ Initial Reading

Background. Problems of finding meaning of what is being read can accompany students’ already formed skills of fluent reading, reducing their academic success. The issues of reader’s literacy are in the focus of modern psychological and pedagogical research, and the consideration of the mechanisms of its formation at the initial stages of learning to read is therefore relevant.

Objectives. The study performs the analysis of the quality of children’s orientation in the initial period of learning to read and of the conditions for its actualization.

Study Participants. 26 subjects (6–7 years old) took part in the diagnostic examination, including 10 first-graders and 16 senior preschoolers who studied reading in the kindergarten preparatory group or as a part of preschool training. Experimental teaching for children aged 6–7 years was conducted in two preschool groups of 4 people and in one group of 6 first-graders.

Methods. The assessment of children’s capability to read meaningfully (the first part of the study) was carried out individually according to the modified technique of D.B. Elkonin “fusion of words” (Elkonin, 1998). To test and refine the designed training materials (the second part of the study), 30 half-hour classes were conducted within experimental teaching in each group.

Results. A qualitative analysis of the filled in diagnostic forms and videotaped children’s actions and reasoning allowed us to identify and describe reading strategies demonstrated by children, which we defined as formal (found in 73% of the subjects) and meaningful (27%) — in accordance with the nature of attempts to comprehend what they read, which participants resorted to in the process of deciphering the “fusion of words”. The results of our experimental teaching showed the effectiveness of the approach we developed to create some conditions for meaningful mediation of initial reading.

Conclusions. One of the important conditions for the formation of the meaningfulness in reading during the transition “from letters to words” is to provide the orientative function of referring to reality, standing both for the word itself and for the sentence in which it should be read correctly. The method of “end-forward” reading of deformed words and simplest texts, which we developed, can be considered as a resource for improving the literacy in initial reading.

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