Font.Pdf (400.6Kb)

Infancia y Aprendizaje Journal for the Study of Education and Development ISSN: 0210-3702 (Print) 1578-4126 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riya20 Font legibility in first year primary students / Legibilidad de distintos tipos de letra en alumnos de primero de primaria Juan C. Ripoll To cite this article: Juan C. Ripoll (2015) Font legibility in first year primary students / Legibilidad de distintos tipos de letra en alumnos de primero de primaria, Infancia y Aprendizaje, 38:3, 600-616, DOI: 10.1080/02103702.2015.1054668 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2015.1054668 Published online: 25 Jun 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 233 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=riya20 Infancia y Aprendizaje / Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 2015 Vol. 38, No. 3, 600–616, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2015.1054668 Font legibility in first year primary students / Legibilidad de distintos tipos de letra en alumnos de primero de primaria Juan C. Ripoll Colegio Santa María la Real — Maristas de Sarriguren (Received 6 June 2014; accepted 19 August 2014) Abstract: The typeface used when students learn to read is largely ignored in educational practice and research. In this study, the reading of 115 Spanish first graders was assessed using texts written with six different typefaces, including a cursive script font. Significant differences were found in the number of decoding errors across the different typefaces, but not in fluency problems or number of words correctly read per minute. Our main conclusion is that the use of typefaces similar to handwriting in school texts for primary students who have already started to read is not justified. Keywords: primary school; reading; legibility; typeface Resumen: Existe poca información sobre el tipo de letra más conveniente para el alumnado que comienza el aprendizaje de la lectura. En este estudio se evaluó la lectura de 115 alumnos españoles de primer curso de primaria con textos escritos utilizando seis fuentes diferentes, una de ellas de tipo manuscrito. Se encontraron diferencias significativas en el número de errores de descodificación, pero no en errores de fluidez o en el número de palabras correctamente leídas por minuto. Se concluye que no parece necesario el uso de fuentes de estilo manuscrito en los materiales escolares de los alumnos de primaria que ya han empezado a leer. Palabras clave: educación primaria; lectura; legibilidad; tipo de letra A font or typeface is a set of letters and other symbols that are designed with common characteristics and used in writing. Venezky (1984) found that research concerning the legibility of different typefaces began in 1790. From that date on, numerous studies have been performed in this area. However, there has never been a systematic review or meta-analysis articulating their results, with the exception of a review on the legibility of typefaces in adults with low vision (Russell-Minda et al., 2007). For the purposes of this study, the Sans Seriff, Arial, Helvetica, Verdana and Adsans fonts are considered to be more legible than Times New Roman. English version: pp. 600–607 / Versión en español: pp. 608–615 References / Referencias: p. 616 Translated from Spanish / Traducción del español: Jennifer Martin Author’s Address / Correspondencia con el autor: Colegio Santa María la Real — Maristas de Sarriguren, Paseo de Champagnat, 2. 31621 Sarriguren, Navarra, España. E-mail: [email protected] © 2015 Fundacion Infancia y Aprendizaje Font legibility / Legibilidad de distintos tipos de letra 601 Studies on the legibility of different typefaces in school years during which reading is normally learned are few. Those school years include the last years of preschool education and the first years of primary school education. A systematic search in the ERIC, PsycINFO and Dialnet databases, which also widened the search to the bibliographies of the most relevant studies, only found two studies comparing how students in preschool or in the first years of primary education read different typefaces. De Lange, Esterhuizen, and Beatty (1993) compared a Seriff (Times Roman) and a Sans Seriff font (Helvetica), in other words, fonts with and without horizontal strokes embellishing the upper and lower parts of letters. That study did not find differences in the speed with which students in the second year of primary1 located words in a text written in one font or the other. Woods, Davis, and Scharff (2005) studied how students between the third year of preschool and the fourth year of primary distinguished and identified letters in Arial and Times New Roman. They found that the percentage of correct answers was higher with the Arial (Sans Seriff) font than with Times New Roman. Other studies, without comparing different typefaces, have researched other factors related to the way in which a single font can be presented: size of the letter (Hughes & Wilkins, 2000; Katzir, Hershko, & Halamish, 2013;O’Brien, Mansfield, & Legge, 2005; Wilkins, Cleave, Grayson, & Wilson, 2009; Woods et al., 2005); space between characters (Perea, Panadero, Moret-Tatay, & Gómez, 2012); line length (Katzir et al., 2013); or line spacing (Katzir et al., 2013). These studies used different ways to assess the influence of the typographical modifications, such as measuring the time that students took to search for words in a text (De Lange et al., 1993), the time spent deciding if a series of sentences was true or false (Wilkins et al., 2009), the amount of words correctly read per minute, the speed and number of errors (Hughes & Wilkins, 2000;O’Brien et al., 2005), the response to questions related to comprehension of the text (Katzir et al., 2013) or lexical decision and letter discrimination tasks (Perea et al., 2012; Woods et al., 2005). The diversity of the variables studied and the ways in which they were measured barely allowed any conclusion to be made over the most appropriate typeface for students who are beginning to read. The most recurrent result in the studies was the existence of a relationship between letter size and reading performance. Reading improved when the typeface size increased, at least in Arial up to 20 points. None of the studies, performed with students that were beginning to read, compared their progress when cursive or other font styles were used. This is some- thing that is quite relevant since it is common in Spanish-speaking countries to begin to learn to read with materials that use handwritten styles and then later move on to reading with the usual letters used for adults. It is quite difficult to know exactly when the best time to move on is, or which fonts are most appropriate for this transition. In addition, neither one of the two studies that compared typefaces with students from preschool through the third year of primary used text reading tasks in which reading speed or the number of errors were measured. These variables predict a large part of comprehension (Ripoll, Aguado, & Castilla-Earls, 2014). 602 J. C. Ripoll In general, a lack of evidence concerning the most appropriate typeface for children beginning to read means that decisions on what font to use were based on good practices and common sense (Hartley, 2004), in most cases. The British Dyslexia Association style guide (2012) has had a substantial impact in this regard. It indicated that texts can be more easily read when they are written in fonts such as Arial, Comic Sans, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic or Trebuchet, with a minimum 12 point size. These typefaces have proportional spacing in common (the horizontal space that the letters occupy is proportional to their width, in such a way that the m occupies more space than the l) and they also all belong to the Sans Seriff family. To summarize this review, research on the effect of different typographical characteristics on beginning readers was rather limited and barely permitted any practical conclusions to be drawn, except for the advantage of using notably larger typefaces than those used in printed material for adults. This review did, however, provide two clear guidelines concerning the method to follow for new studies on the legibility of the different typefaces. The first was the importance of assuring that the size of the typefaces for comparison remains constant. The second was the necessity of using measures related to reading efficiency. In the absence of studies on the transition between reading with cursive style fonts and non-cursive styles, the study described here evaluated the way in which students beginning primary, who had worked on reading during preschool with a cursive font, read different fonts. The aim was to obtain information about which non-cursive font was most legible for these students. Method Participants The initial sample was made up of 120 male and female students in their first year of primary education, between the ages of 5;9 and 6;10 years. The students were all native Spanish speakers and, as such, were educated in Spanish. They studied in a concerted school (a private institution subsidized by the state) near the city of Pamplona (Spain). They had started learning to read during the previous school year using a cursive style font. There were four students enrolled in a special education unit who were excluded from the study. Another student who had enrolled in the school was originally from Greece and was also excluded. Thus, the reading test was only given to 115 of the students. At the time of the evaluation, one of the participants was diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Twenty months after the study had concluded, another student also received a diagnosis of ADHD and six more students were diagnosed with a reading learning disability.

Load more