COMPREHENSION ABILITIES AND VOCABULARY DEVELOPMENT AT THE INITIAL LEVEL

Mariela Vanesa De Mier

Abstract

In recent years, educational research has focalised on the cognitive and linguistic development in children of pre-school age because it has been observed that the abilities and knowledge developed early have an impact on learning in the stages that follow. In order to diminish the rift between children of different sociocultural contexts, the empiric evidence focalised on the application of systematic strategies to guide the children’s learning. Where comprehension is concerned, the impact of the abilities that have been previously developed and nurtured orally as readers has been observed and this leads to the importance of generating situations of interactive reading from initial level. In such situations the  teacher guides the activation of previous knowledge on the theme, the realisation of inferences and the knowledge of vocabulary. It is a matter of reading texts aloud with teacher-planned interventions that will take place in the dialogue before, during and after reading to facilitate
understanding and the development of vocabulary. In this work, the theoretical bases of interactive reading have been presented. Furthermore, examples are presented of such a practice taken from a programme of integral development (The programme We Want to Learn or Queremos Aprender).