Project LEGA

Reading strategies in primary school

The LEGA project focuses on investigating the use of reading strategies by primary school children in relation to available vocabulary and contextual information. In addition to several important predictors of word reading (such as phonological awareness or phonological working memory), a child’s existing vocabulary also has an influence on word reading and word recognition. Vocabulary is only predictive of reading comprehension for children with moderate to high fluency, i.e. children who are likely to use more retrieval strategies.

In addition, there is a change in the predictors of reading comprehension between the first and third grades: the importance of vocabulary increases over time, while the importance of phonological awareness decreases. The aim of this project is to investigate whether different predictors are important for reading comprehension depending on the strategies used, and whether children with a larger vocabulary use retrieval strategies faster and more often than children with a smaller vocabulary. Several studies have already shown that contextual information helps children to read and recognise words more quickly. Previous studies have shown that younger and weaker readers benefit more from contextual information than older and better readers. In addition, contextual information seems to help especially with difficult (compared to easy) words. However, there has been no detailed analysis of the context effect at the level of reading strategy.

The LEGA project aims to investigate whether context actually causes children to switch from basic to more efficient strategies, and whether the effect of context varies according to pre-existing reading strategy skills. In collaboration with cooperating schools and parents, children in second and fourth grade will participate in three measurement points. In addition to reading strategy use, vocabulary and reading comprehension and fluency will be assessed.