The Boundaries of Written Words as Seen by First Graders

Abstract

if one aspect of learning to read can be described as learning to associate groups of letters with the spoken words which are their counter-parts, then the child's inability to determine the boundaries for written words may make it difficult for the child to form this association. This study attempted to determine the extent to which 39 children who had been in first grade for two and a half months were able to discriminate the boundaries of written words. best readers in the class were completing their third pre-primer. Scott Foresman series, The New Basic Readers, with its emphasis on vocabulary and sentence control, rather than on spelling-to-sound correspondences, served as their introduction to reading. Since what children learn depends greatly upon the nature of the instructional materials to which they are exposed, the data obtained from these 39 children may be peculiar to their particular experiences. intent of this study is not to describe typical first grade behavior in the discrimination of word boundaries. Rather, the purpose is to demonstrate the extent and types of confusions about word boundaries among these children and to suggest that reasonable attempts to define a word are made by the chad unsuspected and unaided by teacher or textbook

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