site.btaBulgarian-Italian Research Project Assesses Young Children’s Reading Skills

A Bulgarian–Italian research project assessing the reading skills of young children has produced a set of clear, practical recommendations for parents and teachers, including encouraging reading aloud and avoiding an early focus on speed. The findings were presented on Tuesday by the Institute for Bulgarian Language with the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), which took part in the international project “Assessment of Reading and Reading Comprehension Skills in Early School Age in Bulgaria and Italy.”

The project was carried out within the framework of cooperation between BAS and Italy’s National Research Council (CNR) and was funded by both institutions. Funding for the Bulgarian side amounted to about EUR 6,000 over a three-year period.

Based on the research, experts recommend that children in the first, second and third grades read aloud, as this leads to better comprehension of written texts. They also advise that pupils follow the text with a finger, which helps improve focus and understanding at both word and sentence level, Prof. Dr. Svetla Koeva, Director of the Bulgarian Language Institute, told BTA and the Bulgarian National Radio.

Researchers also caution against emphasizing reading speed at an early age, noting that children who read too fast often sacrifice accuracy and comprehension.

The project was led by Prof. Svetla Koeva and Prof. Vito Pirrelli. The Bulgarian research team included Ivelina Stoyanova, Valentina Stefanova, Tsvetana Dimitrova, Maria Todorova and Hristina Kukova, while the Italian team comprised Claudia Marzi, Marcello Ferro, Andrea Nadalini and doctoral student Alessandro Lento.

The study was conducted in cooperation with the Hristo Botev Secondary School No. 21 in Sofia, which provided a real classroom environment for testing the project’s multimodal research methods.

More than 80 students in Bulgaria and 73 students from a school in Pisa took part, all from second to fifth grade.

Researchers used specially designed, age-appropriate texts with gradually increasing linguistic complexity. After each text segment, students answered questions to show comprehension. Children read both silently and aloud, while following the text with a finger on a tablet screen. Three types of data were collected and analyzed: textual data, audio recordings of reading, and tactile data tracking finger movement.

According to Prof. Koeva, this approach allows for a multidimensional assessment of reading skills and can be used to develop an automated system for evaluating text complexity. Such a tool could help textbook authors assess and adjust texts before publication, she said.

A comparative analysis showed that Bulgarian second- and third-grade students performed slightly better than their Italian peers, a difference attributed mainly to age and the timing of the experiments during the school year.

The results also indicate that reading skills can improve significantly within a relatively short period of time.

Presenting the findings, Prof. Koeva highlighted the importance of modern methods from computational linguistics and multimodal data analysis, while Prof. Pirrelli outlined the research infrastructure built for the project and its potential to improve reading instruction.

Also attending the presentation of the project were representatives from the Ministry of Education and Science, faculty from Sofia University, researchers from the Institute for Bulgarian Language, from the GATE Institute at Sofia University, and from the GIS Transfer Center Foundation, as well as representatives of two publishers, Klett Bulgaria and Az-buki.