TEACHING WORD RECOGNITION IN THE CONTEXT OF READING CHILDREN’S BOOK

Abstract

The acquisition and the maintenance of reading behavior, as any other operant, depend on powerful reinforcing consequences. The reading behavior of beginners, however, is usually insufficient to generate the natural reinforcers derived from reading. This study investigated whether teaching words of children’s books through an errorless teaching procedure that promotes the transfer of stimulus control from echoic to textual behavior would affect the acquisition  and maintenance of reading. A computerized procedure was designed to teach eight sets of 10 words each to individual participants. Each word set was composed of words from a single book. Two extra word sets were used for baseline assessment according to a multiple baseline design across word sets. After reaching accurate reading of a word set, the student had the opportunity to read the book from which the words had been selected. Reading the book was supervised by an adult, who modeled correct responding whenever necessary. A new wordset was introduced only after the student showed proficiency in a previous set. Six students with a history of school failure learned to recognize printed words on the computer screen, showed reading retention in subsequent assessments, and presented high levels of accuracy in recognizing the same words when inserted in a connected text in the books. The development of textual control across successive word sets became increasingly faster and less dependent on echoic control. The results suggest that the procedure could be an appropriate alternative for teaching word recognition to beginning readers, as an initial step from which to proceed with teaching the arbitrary relations between phonemes and graphemes that characterize the point-to-point correspondence in textual behavior. The opportunity of reading the books and identifying the words previously learned in the computer seemed tohave significant reinforcing value.Keywords: reading acquisition, word recognition, echoic behavior, textual behavior, children’s books, motivation,children