Proposal of a tool to evaluate cognitive prerequisites of literacy in pre-school children
Giovanni Bilancia, Davide Filippi, Giulia Fronza, Gloria Imperato, Francesco Meucci, Giulia Orlandini
The present research tries to explore the symbolic and conceptual prerequisites (assumption) of literacy in pre-school children. This study follows up a research term (Stella and Stradi, 1991) aimed at verifying the evolution of the skills of conceptualization and symbolization in relation to reading and writing abilities. The models of the development of thought (Vygotskij, 1934; Piaget, 1936; Pascual-Leone, 1976), symbol (Bialystok, 1992, Ferreiro and Teberosky, 1979; Ferreiro, 2003; Donald, 1991; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) and language (Clark, 1974; Rosch, 1976; Markmann, 1991) were examined to create a lot of tasks. The first study used a paper mode and involved 86 children aged between 36 and 76 months. In the second one, 165 children aged between 29 and 76 months were asked to use a digital instrument. In both researches, the participants are native Italian speakers without any clinical diagnosis. This test is composed by activities that require a readability judgment, length of auditory stimuli (words and non-words) and discrimination between meaning and signifier. Moreover, the identification of visual and auditory symbols and the identification of typical abilities of pre-operative thought were key aspects of the tests. Our data contribute to the analysis of symbol conceptualization, typical of the pre-conventional period of reading and writing skills. Further researches are needed, such as monitoring the progress of the tests with children in following stages of literacy (school age), in addition to the analysis of the instrument functionality with subjects characterized by clinical diagnosis.
Keywords
Pre-school age, emergent literacy, awareness of literacy, symbol conceptualization, social meaning of symbol.