Invented spelling activities in kindergarten: the role of instructional scaffolding and collaborative learning

ABSTRACT

There is considerable evidence on the connections between emergent literacy-related skills in preschool-age and successful reading and writing. The purpose of this double-designed experimental/descriptive study was to analyse the impact of invented spelling activities on kindergarten children’s spelling performance and to explore adult mediation and peer collaboration processes that occurred within a sample of intervention sessions. Data was collected with 52 participants divided into an experimental group and a control group who were submitted to a pre/post-test assessment. The global quantitative analysis revealed the strong impact of the intervention on children’s word spelling progress scores. The descriptive qualitative data of 2304 verbal interventions of a small-scale sample suggested that significant and diverse mediation scaffolding strategies were incorporated by the children in a shared dialogical learning approach. Our findings point to the need for delivering group interaction activities combining early literacy contents in kindergarten contexts as a vehicle for responding to the challenge of reading and writing acquisition at the beginning of schooling.

KEYWORDS:

• Invented spelling
• early literacy
• instructional scaffolding
• collaborative learning
• kindergarten

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Grant ID: SFRH/BD/112133/2015).