Conhecimentos linguísticos na Educação Infantil: as atividades de sensibilização fonológica como contributo para aquisição do Sistema Notacional Alfabético.

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation addresses reflective learning of the Alphabetical Notation System (ANS) from Pre-school to the first grade in Elementary Schoolwith 4-6-yearold children. The longitudinal study was carried out with 15 children (8 students in the intervention group and 7 ones in the control group) who attend a public city school located in Várzea Grande, Mato Grosso, Brazil, from 2017 to 2020. Activities of phonological awareness were systematically applied to the intervention group in the first two years in order to evaluate whether they collaborate to develop metalinguistic abilities which are needed for reflective learning of the ANS. The study is supported by Ferreiro and Teberosky’s (1990, 1999) and Piaget’s (1971, 1972, 1975)perspectives on constructivism, by the paradigm of Psycholinguistics in phonological awareness, in agreement with Tolchinsky and McBride-Chang (2011), Carraher and Rego (1981), Gombert (1992), Cardoso-Martins (1991) and Morais (2012) and studies of the nature of (ortho)graphic errors conducted by Miranda (2009, 2011, 2019, 2020). Three tools were used for analyzing data: word and sentence dictations, a test of nominal realism and a written text. They provided different types of data: (a) conceptions of writing; (b) perceptions of the relation between speaking and writing; (c) evaluation of sound characteristics of words (size, similarity, difference); and (d) production of alphabetic writing whose focus is phonological errors. Interviews guided by Piaget’s clinical method (CARRAHER, 1986; DELVAL, 2002) aimed at providing data on children’s ways of thinking about the ANS. The analysis showed that, at the beginning of the study, children in both groups did not perceive oral language as a tool to help their writing but involvement in reflective situations related to the ANS – enabled by a teaching process that systematically triggers linguistic reflection in early childhood education– made children in the intervention group improve their thinking about ASN characteristics. This fact led to positive effects on the learning of this social construct in the first grade in Elementary School. Data under investigation showed that children in the intervention group developed certain abilities that enabled them to identify a word also as a sound chain, to carry out tasks that involved rhymes and alliterations and to segment a word in parts using the syllable unit as the reference. After having conquered the alphabetic principle, children in the intervention group produced fewer errors, which were found to be motivated by phonological complexities, such as registration of nasality and non-conventional segmentation. It was understood as the result of the set of tasks that enabled reflection on oral and written language throughout early childhood education.