Resultados de un programa de alfabetización temprana: Desempe？o en lectura en ni？os de sectores en desventaja socioeconómica

the purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the process of early literacy in spanish in children with cultural and socio-economic disadvantages. likewise, it aims at showing the results of a study about reading skills - specifically the reading of words and texts by 4 to 7 year-old children. the study was conducted following research models of cognitive psychology and was carried out by comparing the performance of two groups of children, the test group and the control group. these children attended public schools in the province of buenos aires (argentina) and they were treated as equivalents in all of the analyzed variables. one of the groups received specific early literacy intervention for two years. the assessments were made before, during and midway after finishing the intervention. the reading of words and pseudo words as well as reading and reading comprehension were evaluated. gough and juel (1989) propose a simple reading model that states that reading comprehension is the result of the multiplication of decoding and oral language comprehension [rc (reading comprehension) = d*lc (decoding multiplied by language comprehension)]. the multiplying nature of this relationship means that both factors, d and lc, are necessary for comprehension purposes but none of them are sufficient by themselves (gough, juel, & griffith, 1992; hoover & gough, 1990). by analyzing the correlation between rc and each of the two factors, it is clearly shown that decoding is the most important step at the beginning of the learning process [r (rc*d) = .61 and r (rc*lc) =.39] and that the values are later reversed at the beginning of secondary school [r (rc*lc) = .68 and r (rc*d) = .39] (alegría, 2006). therefore, the differences in the reading comprehension process during the first years of schooling could be due to differences in fluency in reading. at the same time, the automatic word recognition theory (la berge & samuels, 1974) provides a strong explanation