Habilidades preditoras de leitura em escolares do 1º ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

There are a large range of predictors of the reading development in the literature. Regarding the language aspects, the phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, phonological working memory and letter identification have been widely described as relevant for this process. Aim: to evaluate and to characterize the predictors of reading skills in first grade students of public schools in Natal-RN and correlate theses habilities with each other. Method: 138 children between 6- and 7- years-old participated, from three public schools of Natal/RN. The assessment was made based on phonological awareness – Phonological Awareness Test – Sequencial assessment instrument CONFIAS; phonological access of the lexicon – Rapid automatized naming test; Phonological working memory – Working memory task – pseudowords and digits; Letter identification – letter identification subtest – PROLEC; expressive vocabulary – vocabulary subtest – Infant language test ABFW. Results: the children had worst performance than expected on expressive vocabulary, especially on the categories of clothing, food, places, shapes and colors; phonological processing, except on RAN ‘objects’, and letter identification; the habilities showed a weak correlation with each other. Conclusion: the children from this study performed worst than expected according to their schooling on phonological processing tasks, vocabulary and letter identification, which can influence the literacy process, highlighting the need of further studies as to intervention practice, in order to minimize the impact of these difficulties over the school life.