Kindergarten Students' Awareness of Reading at Home and in School

This study investigated children's awareness of how they are learning to read at home and in school. Fifty-six kindergarten children were selected from two schools that used different instruction for beginning reading. In one school the instruction was individualized and emphasized a whole language approach but with language experience activities, shared reading and writing, and phonics. Instruction in the other school was structured around a commercial phonics-based beginning reading program that emphasized whole-class instruction. The children were interviewed and asked questions designed to tap their awareness of how they were learning to read in March and May of kindergarten and September of first grade. An early reading test was administered in September and May of the kindergarten school year to relate awareness to reading achievement. A parent questionnaire was administered to assess home support for early reading. The children's awareness responses were analyzed to determine how they described learning to read and what they said they used when learning to read. The overall results demonstrated that kindergarten children can describe how they are learning to read at home and in school. Other relevant findings were that the responses match home literacy and school instruction and change over time. Instructional setting was a salient feature in that children who received individualized and small-group instruction gave more detailed and comprehensive responses than did the children who received phonics-based instruction.