A Study On The Reading Ability Of Picture Books Of Middle And High Grade Students In Elementary School

Reading is a main approach for children to gain outside information,as well as a crucial impetus for their development.As a reading material integrated texts with drawings,the picture book is greatly more abundant in visual information compared with plain text,and as a result,reading a picture book would be even more demanding in speed and accuracy of information processing.This paper was composed of two relative studies.In the first study,we tried to construct a theoretical frame on picture book reading ability,which combined previous classifications and the practice of picture book reading.After a series of preliminaries,editing and formal experiments,the Picture Book Reading Questionnaire(PBRQ)suited to primary school upper-class pupils was developed and it was found to have satisfactory validity and reliability with even distribution of difficulty and discrimination in each item.In the second study,374 primary school students from 3th,4th and 5th class participated to be examined the picture book reading ability by PBRQ and Chinese reading(plain text)ability besides a visual search task within 95 students who were randomly chosen from 374 former participants.The results showed that grade(F(1,368)=55.95,p<0.01)and gender(F(2,368)=7.25,p<0.01)were two significant factors resulting in the difference in the ability of picture book reading.In terms of lower level comprehension skill,the scores of 4th class are significantly higher than that of 3rd class while there is without a significant difference between 4th class and 5th class.As for higher level comprehension skill,the scores depends on the grade.The ability in visual search task had the ability to predict children's reading ability in picture book reading and Chinese reading(plain text).In conclusion,this study was design to assess developmental traits of primary school students' picture book reading ability and explore the predictability of visual research task.This paper came complete with the hope to attract schools' and families' interest in picture book and by that to promote students' comprehensive reading ability.