Vocabulary acquisition and children's book reading: strategies used by a first-grade teacher

This paper describes the results of a research whose objective was to investigate strategies used by a first-grade teacher in the school in Rio Grande do Sul, to work on vocabulary while reading children's books for her students in class. Data shown and discussed by this text were collected during class observation and interviews with the teacher. Theoretical references were studies carried out by Stein and Rosemberg (2010), Manrique (1997), Moreira (1984) and Melo (2005). The following strategies used by the teacher while reading stories were highlighted: 1) word juxtaposition and word meaning; 2) explicit questions to check children's previous knowledge; 3) interventions which focus specifically on vocabulary; 4) use of physical aspects of the book, such as illustrations, which provide contextual information; 5) children testing their hypotheses regarding word derivation; 6) prediction, mainly both steps called information processing and response evaluation; and 7) repetition, when children not only repeat the talk, but also re-structure it in order to present its meaning. The situation in which children's books were read for first graders was considered to make students work on vocabulary and make their access to the semantic system easier, responsible for the meaning of the words.