Use of the Teacher’s Oral Regulation as a Strategy to Aid Reading Comprehension: An Experimental Study in Third Grade Students in Chilean Schools

Abstract

In the educational task of text comprehension, a frequent activity in classrooms is accompanying reading put into dialogue with interventions from the teacher. One way of organizing this activity is incorporating episodes with a regulatory component that externally promotes a guide for action that allows justifying an explicit goal as a success indicator. The goal of this study is to evaluate the impact of a reading planning episode comprised of regulatory oral aid with components associated with the justification of the reading activities and the specification of reading comprehension goals for children in 3rd grade of elementary school in the Chilean school system, with a sample distributed among 4 experimental groups: with/without regulatory verbalized intervention and autonomous/non-autonomous reading. It can be pointed out that Chilean students benefitted from isolated regulatory aid or regulatory aid accompanied by oral reading once it was matched with measures of non-verbal intelligence, memory, vocabulary, oral and text comprehension, precision, and word reading speed. This portrays the relevance of evaluating and discussing these implications within the area of the initial and continuous training of teachers.