Strategies used in the early stages of learning to read: a comparison of children and adults

Summary The research compared the reading strategies used by adults and children in the early stages of learning to read. There were 72 adults (48 men and 24 women) and 96 children (64 boys and 32 girls) in the study. The reading ages of all subjects ranged (in years and months) from 7.0 to 7.11. Additionally, the chronological ages of the children ranged from 7.0 to 7.11; those of the adults ranged from 19.0 to 44.11. Children whose reading ages corresponded to (or were slightly above) their chronological ages were grouped together as abler readers. Those whose reading ages fell two or more months below their chronological ages were grouped together as less able readers. There were thus two equal groups of children (48 in each group). All subjects read two texts orally, one having more adult appeal, the other having more child appeal. Both texts were similar with respect to length, number of sentences and proportion of ‘difficult’ words. The subjects' comprehension of the texts and the texts' vocabulary was tested immediately after each reading. Before reading one of the texts, subjects were given a brief preview of its content; this included the text's title, main idea of the text and an illustration depicting the main theme of the text. For the other text, subjects were asked to start reading aloud without any preview. The readings were tape recorded and timed (in minutes and seconds). Miscues were analysed with respect to the readers' sensitivity to graphic and semantic constraints. Hesitations, corrections and deliberate omissions were also noted. Analyses of variance indicated that adults do not necessarily make more use of semantic cues than children. Further it was found that the general strategies used by adult novice readers (including sensitivity to graphic and semantic constraints, numbers of hesitations, corrections, deliberate omissions and reading time) were similar to the strategies of the less able child readers. Also, though the adults' comprehension and vocabulary scores were found to be significantly higher than those of the children, they were not as high as had been expected considering the maturity and presumed superior linguistic and background knowledge of the adults.