Reading for pleasure and early academic literacy with basic education teachers

Abstract

This paper reports intervention work with primary education teachers from the state of Veracruz carried out through an onlinecourse-workshop with the support of digital tools. The intervention sought to foster the teachers’ reading habits as well as providethem with theoretical and methodological elements to lay the foundations of early academic literacy in their students. The work was based on the constructivist theory and the dialogic theory of learning, through the action research methodology and a combined evaluation paradigm. Individual interviews as well as a pretest-posttest were applied prior to the intervention work to learn about its impact. The questionnaires provided information on each participant through open and closed questions. When contrasting the results, changes were identified that show that the intervention had a positive impact on the participants. Likewise, statistical analyses of the questions indicated that there were significant differences in the teachers’ habits as well as in their teaching practices. We concluded that promoting reading for pleasure in teachers has a positive impact on their students.