Abstract

In Argentina, reading acquisition difficulties come from the linguistic differences, associated to the sociocultural context in which children grow. The goal of this paper is to analyze, in 4 and 5 years old children, the relationship between the socioeconomic and educational home level and the precursor linguistic abilities of reading. This is a quantitative and comparative research. We evaluated 120 children from 4 and 5 years-old classroom from urban (n=60) and urban-marginal schools (n=60). We calculated the parental socioeconomic and educational level from data gathered from the school records. We assessed children´s vocabulary, letter-name and sound knowledge and phonological awareness skills. It was observed a significative effect of the area (urban and urban-marginal) over the parental socioeconomic and educational level. We observed positive relationship between both the socioeconomic and educational level and the letter-name and sound knowledge variable. The regression analysis showed that only in the 4 year old group the contextual variables explained some of the children vocabulary and letter-name and sound knowledge variance: 6% and 13%, respectively. The results suggest that the contextual variables influence the letter-name and sound knowledgeability level that children show at the pre-school stage and that the pedagogical intervention received in school promotes linguistic skills. Facing heterogeneous socioeconomic contexts, school education is a protective variable that regulates inequalities due to sociocultural differences promoting linguistic abilities precursors of reading.

KeyWords: socioeconomic status; family educational level; linguistic skills; prereading skills; 4 and 5 year old school-children.