Publications

Reading literacy is one of the main concerns of the educational community, since it is an essential element in the integral development of individuals and in the current educational system.  The Basque Autonomous Community’s lowest PISA score since 2003 prompted the Department of Education to reassess linguistic strategies regarding the literacy processes of students. Recognizing the benefits of multilingual pedagogies, the government prioritized improving students’ communicative skills, focusing on Basque as a core language. To do so, they launched a pilot PYCTO methodology project in primary schools aimed to enhance reading and writing proficiency in Basque, Spanish, and English. Originating in Barcelona in 2012, PYCTO fosters creativity and visual learning, employing a multimodal, collaborative approach. Implemented through a digital platform, it comprises a digital picture book, student narrative production, and language games, fostering inclusive, personalized learning environments.  

The main objective of this paper is to explore whether a multimodal and multilingual methodology that has creativity as one of its basic principles could favor to a greater extent the development of reading comprehension of 2nd (ages 7-8) and 3rd (ages 8-9) grade primary education students in the three curricular languages in the Basque Autonomous Community (Basque, Spanish and English). For this purpose, we analyzed the development of reading comprehension in students (N=335), focusing on a) syntactic processes related to grammatical structures, b) semantic processes related to the comprehension of sentences, and c) semantic processes related to the comprehension of texts. The results obtained show that multilingual students achieve a higher reading performance when they learn using a multimodal and multilingual methodology that incorporates creativity in the language learning process. It has also been observed that this methodology has had a greater influence on the development of the reading performance of 2nd grade primary education students, since the results of the students in the experimental schools were significantly higher than those of the students in the control schools. This happened in every grade in almost every dimension analyzed in the three languages. The few dimensions where control schools obtained higher scores, the difference with the experimental schools was minimal and statistically insignificant. Therefore, we discuss some of the pedagogical implications derived from this study.