Riitta-Liisa
Korkeamäki
University of Oulu
Mariam Jean Dreher
University of Maryland at
College Park |
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This
study investigated children’s reading strategies and progress when
a meaning-based approach to reading instruction was implemented in
a Finnish 1st-grade classroom. A reading program was designed in which
the teacher introduced predictable books, literacy-related centers,
and minilessons in context on selected letter-sound correspondences.
Field notes and videotapes of individual reading sessions were analyzed
to describe the strategies the students used while reading both familiar
and unfamiliar books. In the fall, in a familiar context, the students
read mostly based on their memory. In an unfamiliar context, the students
used graphemic information and sounded out and elongated the words
and named some letters. Later, they used their phonological recoding
skills in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts. All the students
progressed toward conventional reading, demonstrating that they had
reached at least the alphabetic phase of reading development.
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