Teachers´ difficulties at promoting text processing by kindergarten children”

MANRIQUE, M. S Y BORZONE, A.M

San Antonio. Texas. U.S.A

Congreso; Cognitive Development Society. 6th Biennial Meeting.; 2009

Cognitive Development Society

This study aims to identify those situations in which teachers seemed to be unable to foster children´s text comprehension during story reading at Kindergarten. The comparative constant method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) was employed to analyze teacher–student interactions in twenty six story-reading situations in nine different classrooms. Results showed a common factor in these situations: teachers do not realize that text comprehension is a problem solving process for the children. Teacher interventions do not favor the children comprehension processes when: 1) they focus on isolated information, 2) they allow children to activate knowledge that is not required to understand the text, 3) they do not provide the world – knowledge necessary to make the appropriate inferences the texts require, and 4) they overlook the contradictions text – illustrations or the complexity of the narrative structure. The lack of knowledge about the children’s comprehension processes during story reading may account for the poor teachers´ performance.