Oral reading miscues of fourth-grade Venezuelan children from five dialect regions.

Abstract

The main purpose of this investigation was to analyze both quantitatively and qualitatively reader's oral reading miscues and the retellings of Venezuelan fourth graders in five Venezuelan dialect regions. The major question to be answered was: In what ways do Venezuelan children who speak variations of Spanish use their syntactic, semantic, graphophonic and pragmatic systems and their reading strategies (sampling, predicting, confirming, and correcting) in their process of meaning construction during oral reading? The answer to the major research question reveals that informants from the highlands: Merida and Trujillo are more proficient readers in their meaning construction. In the group of informants from the lowlands the percentages show that at least half of the subjects are similar to the most proficient readers from the highlands. The findings are supportive of a definition of reading as meaning construction. They were able to retell the events in an ordered sequence and to name and develop most of the characters in the story. There were no major dialect features differences between the five Venezuelan regions' informants. Most of the dialect features that children displayed in the oral reading were also present in reader's oral retellings. Among these groups of informants, their dialect can be considered as an unrelated factor to their reading proficiency.