The development of reading and writing abilities among Japanese children : A 3-year follow-up study from preschool to the second grade

要旨

To elucidate the development of reading and writing abilities among Japanese children, we investigated the scores on 13 reading/writing tasks over a 3-year period among children from preschool age (5 to 6 years old) to the second grade of elementary school (7 to 8 years old). Most of 92 subjects (42 girl, 50 boys) completed all 13 tasks. Preschool-age children were given a hiragana naming task (HNT). The five tasks in the first grade were related to reading and writing hiragana, and the seven tasks in the second grade were related to reading and writing both hiragana and kanji. The preschoolers’ median score on the HNT was 38.0 points (max 40.0), and six children had extremely low scores (5-14 points). Twenty-three children (9 girls, 14 boys) had HNT scores below 32.0 points, and these children also tended to have poor scores on the reading/writing tasks in the first and second grade. The children’s HNT scores showed significantly positive correlations with their scores on the hiragana writing task and the kanji reading/writing tasks. The HNT scores also showed significantly negative correlations with the duration of reading in four reading tasks. These results suggest that evaluations of the HNT score in preschool-age children may be useful to predict the reading/writing abilities of school-age children.

主題