Assessment of skills that predict reading success in 1st- and 2nd-grade children of elementary school

PURPOSES: to study the performance of 1st- and 2nd-grade students of elementary school on tasks that assess abilities and skills considered as predictors of reading success. METHODS: we analyzed early reading skills in 73 children aged between six and eight years, from a public school in São Paulo. The instrument used for assessing the children's early reading skills comprised of 20 subtests involving the following skills: "Oral language"; "Phonological processing"; "Comprehension"; "Reading and writing"; and "Print awareness". Data were collected and analyzed by school year (1st and 2nd grades) in order to identify differences in development at the early stages of Reading acquisition. RESULTS: it was found that the performance of some 1st- and 2nd-graders was less than average when compared to the remainder of their group on the skills considered as predictors of literacy. This low performance was identified from the percentage of total correct responses in the assessment Instrument and the classification into percentiles. There were no differences between the two grades in terms of "Oral Language" and "Print awareness". What differentiated one group from the other was their outcome at "Reading and writing" and "Phonological processing" tasks, with 2nd-grade students performing better on the following tasks: (a) word reading; (b) pseudoword reading; (c) word spelling; (d) pseudoword spelling; (e) rhyme production; and (f) reading comprehension. CONCLUSION: schooling influenced the performance on phonological processing abilities, and on reading and writing skills. Phonological processing abilities and print awareness correlated with the decoding involved in the writing and reading of isolated items.