Literacy learning in the early years of primary education: a systematic review of Brazilian scientific production (2013-2023) ⁴

Abstract

This systematic bibliographic review focuses on literacy learning in Brazil from 2013 to 2023. Our aim is to find articles with scientific evidence about practices that favor literacy learning in schools in the early years of primary education. This systematic review followed the 2020 Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses recommendations. We analyzed 33 articles in four categories: pre-literacy factors; methods, strategies, and resources for literacy learning; reading difficulties, especially in special education students; and reading assessment instruments. Our results show (a) the coexistence of several perspectives on literacy learning (especially on the centrality of phonemic awareness, the relevance of preventive interventions for difficulties, the need for systematic and explicit teaching, and the interrelationship between reading and other areas of knowledge); (b) the predominance of research analyzing reading assessment and/or verification instruments to the detriment of those dedicated to teaching practices that ensure reading mastery; and (c) the emphasis of research on teaching perspectives and assessment instruments, with few investigations on effective practices and strategies in literacy learning. These results raise reflections on the alignment between scientific production and the political decisions that guide the financing of reading programs, especially regarding the need for such decisions to be anchored in socially impacting scientific evidence.

Keywords:
Literacy learning; Primary education; Teaching reading.

Resumo

A pesquisa apresentada consiste em uma revisão bibliográfica sistemática sobre a aprendizagem da leitura no Brasil, no período de 2013 a 2023. O objetivo foi identificar artigos que apresentassem evidências científicas acerca de práticas que favorecem a aprendizagem da leitura no contexto escolar, com foco nos anos iniciais do Ensino Fundamental. A metodologia seguiu os parâmetros oferecidos pelo The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses - PRISMA, 2020. Foram analisados 33 artigos, agrupados em quatro categorias: fatores de pré-alfabetização; métodos, estratégias e recursos de ensino da leitura; dificuldades de leitura, com foco em estudantes público-alvo da educação especial; e instrumentos de avaliação da leitura. Os resultados evidenciam: (a) a coexistência de múltiplas perspectivas concernentes à aprendizagem da leitura, ressaltando a centralidade da consciência fonêmica, a pertinência de intervenções preventivas para as dificuldades, a necessidade de um ensino sistemático e explícito e a inter-relação entre a leitura e outras áreas do conhecimento. (b) a predominância de pesquisas voltadas à análise de instrumentos de avaliação e/ou verificação da leitura, em detrimento daquelas dedicadas a práticas pedagógicas que asseguram o domínio da habilidade leitora. (c) a ênfase das pesquisas em perspectivas de ensino e em instrumentos de avaliação, com poucas investigações sobre práticas e estratégias eficazes na aprendizagem da leitura. Os resultados suscitam, ainda, reflexões sobre o alinhamento entre a produção científica e as decisões políticas que orientam o financiamento de programas de leitura, especialmente no que se refere à necessidade de que tais decisões estejam ancoradas em evidências científicas com impacto social.

Palavras-chave:
Aprendizagem da leitura; Ensino fundamental; Ensino da leitura.

Introduction

Reading, a fundamental condition for exercising citizenship and full participation in the literate world, depends on a process that goes from literacy to reading fluency. Public policies must ensure that the early years of schooling teach literacy to students. In Brazil, the topic has been the subject of intense academic, political, and social debates, especially in the face of historical challenges related to inequality, changes in public policies, and contemporary demands for teaching practices based on scientific evidence (Brasil, 2020; Brasil; MEC, 2023).

This study focuses on the first years of primary education regarding literacy learning, considering these years as crucial for this debate. Brazil understand literacy in an increasingly broad way, articulating the command of the alphabetic writing system with the social practices of reading and writing (Soares, 2004; Tfouni, 2010). Consolidated in recent decades, this perspective challenges reductionist approaches and urges schools to promote contextualized and inclusive experiences that respect the diversity of subjects and territories. The Brazilian scientific production on literacy learning takes a strategic role to support public policies and guide teacher training and practices, especially in the face of the demands for equity and good quality in basic education. However, the Brazilian literacy monitoring systems-carried out via large-scale assessments, such as the Basic Education Assessment System, the National Literacy Assessment, Provinha Brasil, and, more recently, the Literate Child Indicator-show worrying data.

As of 2023, the Literate Child Indicator became the main national literacy index, calculated based on state assessments of all students in the second year of primary education, the results of which are standardized by the Basic Education Assessment System scale. A 743-point score serves as the reference to consider a child literate based on a national survey involving specialists and literacy teachers (INEP, 2023b). This pattern implies that students can read words, sentences, and short texts, locate explicit information, infer information in texts that articulate verbal and non-verbal languages, and write everyday texts (despite possible orthographic deviations).

By observing the results of students who had completed primary education and entered secondary education, the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (coordinated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, it evaluates 15-year-old students in reading, mathematics, and science, enabling international comparisons and the analysis of trends over time) indicated that Brazil remains at the bottom of the world ranking, performing significantly below the Organisation average in all assessed areas (INEP, 2023c). Only 52% of Brazilian students have reached the minimum reading proficiency (Level 2), whereas the Organisation’s average totals 74%. Performance has remained stable since 2018 without major advances, and socioeconomic and regional inequalities persist as determinants of learning gaps.

In summary, the INEP report (Brasil, 2023) points out that the Brazilian rates have remained stagnant since 2009, showing that its students leave primary education without a solid mastery of reading. Thus, the document highlights the urgency of measures to mitigate negative impacts on learning and the need for investments in more effective educational policies. According to official national documents, the current situation requires integrated public policies based on scientific evidence that articulate literacy learning, teacher training, socio-emotional development, and the reduction of structural inequalities (Brasil, 2020; Brasil; MEC, 2023). Thus, research on the subject can be fundamental to guide policies and practices. This review aims to contribute to the reflection on this connection and to boost an engagement in investigations that produce socially impacting scientific evidence, responsibly influencing educational policies.

Thus, this bibliographic review aims to delimit and map its field of study, finding the main trends, gaps, and advances in the investigated area and more precisely describing how research is evolving and to what extent it responds to social demands (Campos; Caetano; Gomes, 2023; Galvão; Ricarte, 2019; Girardi, 2020).

Hence the frame of this systematic bibliographic review, which aims to retrieve Brazilian research with socially and scientifically impacting scientific evidence about practices that favor the development of literacy learning in primary education schools.

Methodology

This systematic literature review uses the literature as its data source, applying explicit and systematized methods of search, critical appreciation, and synthesis of the selected information and integrating the results of several studies into a consistent and rigorous panorama of the investigated theme (Galvão; Ricarte, 2019; Campos; Caetano; Gomes, 2023).

This review followed The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA, 2020) methodological guidelines, a widely recognized and used protocol for systematic and transparent bibliographic reviews. It offers a set of rigorous guidelines that assist the preparation and description of systematic reviews and meta-analyses, promoting the clarity, consistency, and replicability of reviews.

From the checklist of the seven topics of PRISMA 2020 (Page et al., 2021) regarding research methods and reporting, this review followed its 27 parameters, which are based on the following steps: (a) definition of the database to be searched, (b) choice of inclusion and exclusion criteria, (c) identification of relevant studies, (d) selection of studies based on the inclusion criteria defined for the study, (e) extraction of data from reading and tabulation into a file, (f) statistical analysis of the data, and (g) the interpretation of quantitative and qualitative results in the light of the research objectives and the characteristics of the included studies considering the consistency of their results, the magnitude of their estimated effect, and the robustness of their conclusions.

The Scientific Electronic Library Online, a network that gathers full-text scientific journals from various areas of knowledge, 17 countries, and more than 1,200 open access journals, was chosen as the database to be searched. In 2019, consolidated as the largest digital scientific library in Latin America, it had about 700,000 articles and an annual average of 1.2 million downloads (Packer, 2019), evincing its relevance as a documentary universe that supported this investigation.

The aspects in Chart 1 were considered as the inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Chart 1
Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion criteria	Exclusion criteria
Survey with participants.	Bibliographic and documentary research, theoretical essays, experience reports.
A description of practices and/or interventions in schools that positively impacted literacy learning via quantitative/qualitative data.	Research in contexts other than schools.
Schools in the early years of elementary education.	Fails to fit the school segment for this research.
Research that evinces/generates social and scientific impact.	A description of practices and/or interventions in school without quantitative/qualitative data of positive impacts on literacy learning.

• Source: Prepared by the research team.

To retrieve the relevant studies for the theme (literacy learning), the following parameters were chosen to define the descriptors on Thesaurus Brasileiro da Educação. The search with the word “leitura” retrieved 53 correlated terms, understood as descriptors (D). Those among them deemed most pertinent to the research objectives were selected: (D1) aprendizagem da leitura, (D2) ensino da leitura, (D3) aptidão para leitura, (D4) maturidade para leitura, (D5) bateria de avaliação dos comportamentos iniciais de leitura - BACIL -, (D6) clube de leitura, (D7) democratização da leitura, (D8) desenvolvimento da leitura, (D9) dificuldade na leitura, (D10) estímulo à leitura, (D11) habilidade de leitura, (D12) melhoria da leitura, (D13) níveis de leitura, and (D14) comportamento leitor. The Boolean operators “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT” were ignored but quotation marks were used to indicate the search for terms rather than words.

The search took place from August 10 to October 15, 2023, totaling 2,545 articles. Then, filtering began; first for a timeframe, selecting articles published from 2013 to 2023, which decreased the number of chosen articles to 1,532. Then, after reading their titles and abstracts, 1,032 articles that failed to directly address the theme were excluded. Finally, 174 duplicates were excluded, obtaining a 326-article corpus for full reading.

Directly linked to this process, the results were imported onto an Excel spreadsheet, in which the defining elements of the inclusion and exclusion criteria of this review were recorded. However, in view of the number of articles to be analyzed, the 98 articles indexed in journals classified as Qualis A1⁷ by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel at the time of the investigation were prioritized in the analysis. Of these, 33 (35%) met all the inclusion criteria defined for this investigation.

Results and discussion of data

Reading the 33 retrieved articles in full and the data organized on the extraction guide categorized the results into four groups according to the elements that address literacy learning in the early years of primary education (Chart 2).

Chart 2
Analysis categories

Categories of analysis	Number of articles
(1) Pre-literacy factors.	4
(2) Methods, strategies, and resources for literacy learning.	8
(3) Reading difficulties, especially in special education students.	6
(4) Reading fluency and mastery assessment instruments.	15

• Source: Prepared by the research team.

Pre-literacy factors

The first category addresses pre-literacy factors, highlighting previous skills that support literacy such as phonological awareness, knowledge of the alphabet, basic cognitive aspects, vocabulary, and oral comprehension of the language, all of which are acknowledged as crucial for the development of reading. This category includes the following articles: Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins (2015), Monteiro and Soares (2014), Justi et al. (2020), and Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012).

A notable agreement between these studies refers to the impact of reading fluency on text comprehension, highlighting the importance of automatism in word identification. Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012) stressed the existence of a negative correlation between reading speed and total reading time in all investigated groups. The authors showed that fluency and accuracy in word identification affected reading comprehension, signaling the complexity of this skill. Along these lines, the authors indicated the need for tailored approaches to address specific difficulties in reading comprehension, involving basic word recognition skills and strategies that promote global text comprehension, including language skills, memory, inference, and knowledge of the world.

Another point of convergence between these studies refers to the need for specific interventions to address specific difficulties in reading comprehension. Thus, Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins (2015) and Justi et al. (2020) highlight the emphasis on the early identification of children at risk of reading difficulties, describing instruments to find specific predictors for these difficulties (such as phonemic awareness and letter-name knowledge). While Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins (2015) focused on phonemic awareness and rapid automized naming, Justi et al. (2020) highlighted letter-name knowledge as a strong predictor. Both studies highlight the relevance of preventive interventions to assist students’ learning process, minimizing the possibilities of reading difficulties. However, they showed no data on teaching practices that can mitigate such difficulties.

Monteiro and Soares (2014) investigated reading word strategies in primary school children. Their results indicated that only learning the name of the letters without correlating it with their corresponding sound can impair literacy learning. Reading strategies that combine a consonant and a vowel, associated with a partial knowledge of the rules of letter-sound correspondence and difficulty in analyzing non-canonical syllabic structures can also delay learning.

As a possibility of overcoming difficulties, Monteiro and Soares (2014) indicate the explicit and systematic teaching of letter-sound correspondences and syllabic structures in literacy activities. They describe integrating procedures of distinction, segmentation, and manipulation of sound units to analyze their correspondents in writing as a possible promoter of the development of children’s reading skills.

Note the different methods and focuses of the studies in this analytical category: varied evaluation instruments and theoretical perspectives may lead to varied results. While Justi et al. (2020) highlighted the relevance of letter-name knowledge as a strong predictor of reading and writing skills, Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012) and Monteiro and Soares (2014) discussed the importance of factors such as reading fluency and high-level cognitive skills.

Some studies emphasized the importance of the phonological pathway, whereas others, the lexical pathway as an effective reading strategy, especially for familiar words. Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins (2015) investigated the relationship between phonemic awareness, rapid automized naming, and persistent reading difficulties. Monteiro and Soares (2014) focused on word reading strategies, such as the association between knowledge of letters and the decoding of syllabic structures. Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012) examined basic reading and comprehension skills in students with and without learning difficulties.

This set of findings evinces reading as a multifaceted skill supported by several cognitive pathways and strategies, and that full comprehension depends on the development of basic skills and the early identification of difficulty predictors. Such aspects point to the need for integrated teaching practices that include multiple learning routes and interventions. Thus, these articles direct the reflection toward teaching strategies that develop basic decoding skills and stimulate global understanding, involving linguistic aspects, memory, inference, and knowledge of the world.

As contributions to teaching practice, Monteiro and Soares (2014) also found the importance of the explicit and systematic teaching of letter-sound correspondences and syllabic structures, whereas Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012) evinced the need for a non-reductionist approach that involves basic word recognition skills and strategies that promote global text comprehension.

Discussions on several reading strategies, such as via phonological and lexical pathways, offer guidelines for intervention programs that suit students’ individual needs. However, the varying results and methodological approaches in the chosen articles highlight the complexity of literacy learning and the ongoing need for research and the development of evidence-based practices with effective social impact.

Methods, strategies, and resources for literacy learning

The second category in this review includes articles on the elements of the methods, strategies, and resources to support the development of reading; namely: Fabri et al. (2022), Sargiani et al. (2015), Dias et al. (2015), Almeida and Giordan (2014), Ruiz (2022), Assis et al. (2021), Kirchof and Silveira (2018), and Basso (2017).

Fabri et al. (2022) and Sargiani et al. (2015) described cognitive and metacognitive strategies in reading development practices, highlighting the need for these strategies to control and self-control learning processes by indicating that methods and activities that develop these skills can promote the effective learning of written language and reading.

Dias et al. (2015) and Basso (2017) focused on the importance of adapting teaching strategies throughout the school years in the face of the progressive demand for greater complexity in reading skills.

Almeida and Giordan (2014), Ruiz (2022), and Assis et al. (2021) found the influence of reading on the learning process of other skills and knowledge. The authors stressed the relevance of articulating teaching methods and strategies that link reading to interdisciplinary elements. Almeida and Giordan (2014) addressed reading linked to scientific literacy, Ruiz (2022) highlighted the cognitive strategies involved in the relationship between playing and reading, and Assis et al. (2021) explored the interconnection between reading skills, mathematics, and executive functions in learning.

Studies vary in their methodological approach and research focus. Fabri et al. (2022) and Sargiani et al. (2015) used statistical analyses to examine the relationship between chosen variables and reading performance. Almeida and Giordan (2014) and Basso (2017) adopted more qualitative approaches to investigate specific aspects of learning.

Studies in this category show that the development of reading depends on decoding words and on mobilizing cognitive and metacognitive strategies, which are fundamental for having control over learning processes (Fabri et al., 2022; Sargiani et al., 2015). They all agree on the need to adapt methods and strategies throughout schooling, following the growing complexity of reading ability (Dias et al., 2015; Basso, 2017). Another point refers to the interdisciplinary articulation of reading, which is linked to literacy (Almeida; Giordan, 2014; Ruiz, 2022; Assisi et al., 2021). Despite methodological differences, all studies highlighted reading as a multifaceted competence that requires mastering basic skills and applying complex and contextualized strategies.

Thus, these studies argue that effective teaching practices should develop cognitive and metacognitive strategies, continuously adapt methodologies to reading complexity, and integrate reading with other areas of knowledge.

Reading difficulties, especially in special education students

This category includes Barby and Guimarães (2016), Gomes and Souza (2016), Medina and Guimarães (2021), Ribeiro et al. (2021), Silva and Cavalcanti (2021), and Pelosi et al. (2018).

Barby and Guimarães (2016) evaluated the impact of a teaching intervention program on the development of reading and writing in five children with Down syndrome at the beginning of their literacy learning. The authors pointed out that, despite the limitations of their research (such as its small number of participants and its absence of a control group), their article offered a concrete educational response to the difficulties in literacy of students with Down syndrome, showing that they face no qualitatively different challenges from students with typical development. Thus, although they may require longer teaching and adapted activities, the learning strategies used by students with Down syndrome resemble those of other students.

Gomes and Souza (2016) investigated the difficulties students with autism spectrum disorder faced to acquire reading skills to understand the effects of a direct teaching procedure of naming syllables and figures to establish combinatorial reading with comprehension. Their results showed significant improvements in areas such as oral word reading, reading comprehension, and identification of printed words after the intervention. However, the authors stressed the need for broader evaluations and replication of their article in other educational contexts to enable the generalization of their results.

Correlating reading performance, phonemic awareness, and executive functions in 28 students aged from nine to 11 years with and without dyslexia, Medina and Guimarães (2021) showed significant differences in several executive functions between groups, including cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. The authors indicated a strong correlation between performance in phonemic awareness, reading tasks, and executive functions, suggesting that interventions focused on these aspects can improve reading performance in individuals with dyslexia. The authors also recommended future studies on the causes and effects of these relationships and the impact of interventions to develop executive functions on reading performance.

Ribeiro et al. (2021) investigated reading patterns in eight children with autism spectrum disorder, focusing on word recognition, reading comprehension, fluency, and their relationship with vocabulary and general intelligence. The results show that those children had average performance in text recognition and fluency with a more pronounced distribution of low and very low performance in text comprehension. The authors highlight the specific reading patterns in children with autism spectrum disorder (who face comprehension difficulties, especially in narrative texts) and stressed the importance of more detailed investigations on the relationships between reading and other cognitive variables.

Silva and Cavalcanti (2021) described the case study of a student in the first year of primary education to analyze the extent to which interventions with phonological awareness activities stimulate the development of writing and reading in a student with intellectual disabilities and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The authors reported significant advances in alphabetic writing and phonological awareness skills after the interventions, highlighting that simple teaching strategies can promote progress even in students with learning difficulties. Their study showed that planned teaching interventions in line with classroom content were crucial for such progress, highlighting the importance of more inclusive and intentional teaching approaches to meet these students’ needs.

In a collective case study with five children and adolescents with Down syndrome, Pelosi et al. (2018) investigated whether systematically stimulating cognitive-linguistic skills, especially phonological ones, could favor literacy and writing learning in this group. The authors applied their interventions via stimulation workshops, coordinated by speech and occupational therapy and pedagogy professionals, with individual evaluations to monitor the evolution of phonological skills. The results showed some individual progress in language skills, such as reading, writing, and interpreting texts, after the workshops. However, evolution in phonological awareness varied between participants. The authors highlight that their intervention positively impacted the development of language skills, despite the limitations of their study, suggesting the effectiveness of systematic stimulation for literacy and writing learning in people with Down syndrome.

The studies in this category address groups with specific educational needs, such as Down syndrome, autism, dyslexia, and intellectual disability, reflecting on the diversity of challenges faced in learning to read in each particularity. Teaching intervention methodology, duration, intensity, and material varied, adapting to the characteristics of each group and educational context. However, all studies emphasized the importance of intentional, clear, and systematic teaching interventions to promote literacy learning in groups with specific educational needs. Of the interventions that favored the development of reading, those aimed at stimulating phonological awareness, textual comprehension, and word recognition stand out.

This evinces that intentional teaching intervention decisively improved reading in groups with specific educational needs, reinforcing that reading is a skill that can be developed for different student profiles under inclusive practices that are adapted and supported by consistent methodologies.

Reading fluency and mastery assessment instruments

The following studies aimed to quantify and measure reading fluency: Simões and Martins (2018), Suehiro and Santos (2015), Pereira et al. (2021), Cunha and Capellini (2017), Viana et al. (2017), Cardoso-Martins and Navas (2016), Guimarães and Mota (2016), Kida et al. (2015), Gomes and Boruchovitch (2015), Martins and Capellini (2014), Carvalho et al. (2013), Pinheiro et al. (2015), Freitag et al. (2009), Barbosa et al. (2015), and Mota et al. (2013).

These articles show several approaches and perspectives in reading assessment and comprehension, highlighting the importance of cognitive, motivational, and linguistic aspects.

Simões and Martins (2018) and Pereira et al. (2021) examined the development of reading fluency throughout the school years, finding changes in error patterns and suggesting fluency as an indicator of reading competence. However, Simões and Martins (2018) focused on error analysis to understand strategies and cognitive evolution and Pereira et al. (2021) investigated fluency as an indicator of competence, especially for special education students.

Suehiro and Santos (2015) and Cardoso-Martins and Navas (2016) assessed specific skills, such as phonological awareness and fluency, highlighting the importance of these skills in educational practice. Suehiro and Santos (2015) evaluated the effectiveness of assessment instruments, whereas Cardoso-Martins and Navas (2016) examined how fluency contributes to reading comprehension, regardless of other skills.

Cunha and Capellini (2017) and Viana et al. (2017) developed and evaluated intervention programs to improve reading comprehension, whereas studies such as Guimarães and Mota (2016) and Gomes and Boruchovitch (2015) explored the contribution of linguistic and motivational factors to reading. Guimarães and Mota (2016) investigated the contribution of morphological awareness to reading in Portuguese, and Gomes and Boruchovitch (2015) proposed and validated a scale of motivation for reading.

Carvalho et al. (2013) and Pinheiro et al. (2015) evaluated and adapted reading assessment instruments for the Portuguese language. The former used item response theory to analyze the quality of an instrument, increasing its diagnostic accuracy, whereas the latter adapted a reading subtest to assess the performance of children at different levels of schooling, offering a methodological resource that can more clearly identify reading skills and difficulties.

Barbosa et al. (2015) and Mota et al. (2013) investigated the development of metalinguistic skills, such as phonological working memory and morphological awareness. Barbosa et al. (2015) examined the development of phonological working memory in several primary education years, whereas Mota et al. (2013) investigated the development of morphological awareness in several age groups.

These studies provide a comprehensive view of studies on reading assessment and comprehension in educational contexts. Although the instruments to measure and evaluate reading are important and offer relevant subsidies for literacy learning, they fail to describe how to carry out or ensure full literacy learning. These instruments are valuable for finding competence levels and areas needing intervention. However, implementing effective strategies to ensure complete learning still depends on specific teaching approaches and targeted teaching practices, the learning impacts of which require development and assessment.

Conclusions

The articles in this literature review cover a wide range of perspectives and approaches related to literacy learning: (1) the recognition of phonemic awareness and fluency in reading to comprehend texts, highlighting the need for automatism in the identification of words and the crucial role of these skills in reading, (2) the consensus on the importance of preventive, punctual, and tailored interventions to address specific difficulties in reading comprehension, with the early identification of children at risk of reading difficulties highlighted as a crucial aspect to promote academic success, (3) the importance of explicit and systematic teaching (highlighted by some studies) such as letter-sound correspondences, syllabic structures, and other word recognition strategies to promote literacy learning, and (4) the articulation between reading skills and other areas of knowledge, such as mathematics, executive functions, and emotional intelligence, acknowledging the influence of reading on the learning of other skills and knowledge.

All the articles in this review, regardless of their methodological approaches or focuses, contributed significantly to the understanding and the practice in teaching and literacy learning, especially on literacy. Studies on pre-literacy factors, such Michalick-Triginelli and Cardoso-Martins (2015), Justi et al. (2020), and Cunha, Silva, and Cappellini (2012), show that the development of skills such as phonological awareness, rapid automized naming, and knowledge of the alphabet is directly related to the improvement of fluency and textual comprehension. Regarding teaching methods and strategies, research such as Fabri et al. (2022), Sargiani et al. (2015), and Almeida and Giordan (2014) show that interventions based on cognitive, metacognitive, and interdisciplinary strategies promote significant advances in reading. Studies aimed at special education students, such as Barby and Guimarães (2016), Gomes and Souza (2016), and Medina and Guimarães (2021), show that teaching interventions adapted to specificities result in concrete progress in reading and writing.

Finally, studies on assessment instruments, such as Simões and Martins (2018), Suehiro and Santos, (2015) and Cardoso-Martins and Navas (2016), offer evidence that measuring fluency and reading comprehension can precisely identify students’ levels of competence, subsidizing more effective teaching interventions. From different perspectives, studies evince that interventions, strategies, and evaluations improve students’ baseline status by developing fluency, expanding textual comprehension, or strengthening cognitive skills, which reinforces the role of national scientific production as an essential support for the development of teaching practices to ensure concrete advances in literacy and train autonomous readers.

However, most studies (44%) focused on reading assessment procedures and tools, addressing skill development and reading fluency, which indicates a strong investment in studies that seek to quantify and measure progress in learning and mastery of reading. While these studies are valuable for understanding student progress and finding areas that need intervention, they fail to provide detailed guidance on how to implement effective teaching practices in everyday classrooms.

This predominance in research occurs to the detriment of studies on specific and detailed teaching practices that contribute to the success of literacy learning. This discrepancy suggests a significant gap in the literature, highlighting the urgent need for research that investigates and evinces practical and accessible reading teaching strategies that are effective in real educational settings. Without such research, educators may lack concrete guidance on how to improve their teaching of reading to meet students’ needs.

This requires continuous research and the development of evidence-based reading practices that significantly impact students’ learning. Governments have funded and experts have offered packages of reading activities. Thus, the lack of research that systematically documents and evaluates the effects of these teaching proposals calls for a better understanding of the theoretical and methodological foundations to guide the large-scale elaboration and application of such activities.

The varying approaches and results in the analyzed research highlight the complexity of literacy learning and the importance of further investigations for advances in this field. Research that explores proven effective teaching practices is essential to ensure that all students can fully develop their reading skills, contributing to a positive and lasting social impact in their lives.

Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment to FAPESP for funding a research project in the Melhoria do Ensino Público call for proposals: “Atuações Educativas de Êxito: aprendizagem, melhorias da convivência e formação continuada de professores com base em evidências científicas.”

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• *
  English version by Juliano Lima. The authors take full responsibility for the translation of the text, including title of books/articles and the quotations originally published in Portuguese.
• 5
  Data availability: The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in this study.
• 7
  The Qualis nomenclature was a classification system used by CAPES in Brazil to evaluate the quality of scientific journals. The Qualis A1 stratum referred to the highest-quality, prestigious, and influential journals in an area of knowledge. Articles in such journals tended toward greater visibility and recognition within the Brazilian scientific community.

Edited by

• Editora:
  Profa. Dra. Ana Luís Paz

Data availability

Data availability: The entire dataset supporting the results of this study was published in this study.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 June 2026
• Date of issue
  2026

History

• Received
  28 Feb 2025
• Reviewed
  07 Oct 2025
• Accepted
  10 Feb 2026