Development of beginning reading: A study in word recognition during the first primary school year.

In this dissertation, which is concerned with the development of beginning reading, the following overarching question was formulated: How does word recognition of primary school pupils develop during the first grade with a Direct Instruction (DI) approach and with a Guided Co-Construction (GCC) approach, and which factors influence children’s beginning reading development? This overarching question implies among other things the following three research questions: 1) Which instructional approach is more effective to stimulate the development of beginning reading in grade 1: Direct Instruction or Guided Co-Construction? 2) Which kindergarten pre-literacy skills are important for the development of children’s word recognition? 3) And finally, how does word recognition of first grade pupils develop?

To answer these questions we have examined the development of word recognition of 178 first grade pupils in a longitudinal study. Names of students and schools are removed from this dataset for privacy reasons.