Kiddy Lit. 995: A linguistic analysis of selected beginning reading texts.

Abstract

Considerations such as word length, word frequency in a child's speaking vocabulary, number of unique words appearing in a story have, at least since The McGuffey Readers, guided the writing of preprimers, the first books that children use when they begin to read in school. This dissertation proposes that text analysis be used as an alternative, and more substantive, method to study beginning reading books. Some nursery rhymes, one folktale, a story with a lot of grammatical words and embedded language, and a "See Dick run" type of text are analyzed here. The author first shows how the "techniques" of traditional oral literature, present in nursery rhymes and folktales, aid a beginning reader. By contrast, a story which uses embedded language, functors or grammatical words, and grammatical morphology is shown to be difficult for some beginners. Current research on child language that compares it to Pidgins, Creoles, and adult informal speech is discussed to support the author's preference for unembedded language in preprimers. The text analysis of children's reading books is grounded in personal classroom experience with beginning readers, and the behavior of children who are having problems with reading is analyzed when applicable to the topic of text selection. Of particular interest are the responses of one struggling adolescent reader when he is asked to compare objects that are members of the same category. There is some discussion of illustrations in first reading books. The author concludes with "dos" and "don'ts" for publishers of beginning reading materials.