A aprendizagem da ortografia e o uso de estratégias metacognitivas.

Abstract

This dissertation presents the results of a research on the use of metacognitive strategies in the learning process of orthography in a second grade class at a private elementary school in the city of Pelotas. Orthography has many aspects that should be considered by the child, because its rules are not of the same kind and involve different competencies in order to be acquired. Sometimes the child will need to pay attention to the letter’s position in a word, and sometimes he/she will need to observe the word’s morphology, among other aspects. Having all this in mind, an intervention that would favor reflection and the expression of thoughts as well as the use of metacognitive strategies has been proposed. The activities, which aimed at the use of metacognitive strategies, had their focus on the errors concerning phonetic and phonologic motivations, as well as on the mistakes concerning the regular contextual correspondences and irregular correspondences that take place among the letters and sounds of the orthographical system. The orthographical error, in this study, has been considered constructive and important for the acquisition process, because it indicates the hypotheses the child has concerning the way the orthographical knowledge is structured. So, the main aims of this study are: a) to describe and to analyze the development of those orthographical errors found in the children’s textual productions, which have been classified according to three categories (category 1 - phonetic and phonologic motivations; category 2 – non observance of contextual rules; category 3 - orthographical system’s irregularities); and b) to evaluate the effects of the metacognitive activities on the children’s orthographical performance. Our findings have shown that the errors classified in the first category were no longer observed after the initial interventions. The errors classified in the second category decreased as the metacognitive activities started to take place and the children begin to construct rules for the use of the orthography; finally, the errors classified in the third category, although decreasing their frequency, are the most resistant to the intervention, since they also demand the use of mnemonic strategies. It is important to mention that the results reveal a clear positive influence of reflexive activities upon the growth of the orthographical knowledge of the children that participated in this study and this is expressed both in children’s spontaneous textual productions, as well as in the oral accounts concerning their errors and the orthographical rules.