O desenvolvimento da consciÃncia metatextual e a alfabetizaÃÃo

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

This study investigated the development of metatextual awareness in children and the influence of the reading and writing acquisition (literacy) in this development. The literature shows that in other types of metalinguistic awareness such as phonological, lexical and syntactic, the literacy plays an important role; however, there are no researches to indicate if the same would occur on metatextual awareness, which is the purpose of this study. Initially, children only present tacit knowledge about the language, which was acquired in informal contacts (epilinguistic behavior). To the extent that the child is submitted to formal education, s/he begins to think deliberately about the language (metalinguistic behavior). Would this pattern of development also be applicable to the metatextual awareness? Would the literacy also be an important factor in this process? To answer these questions, 52 children of public schools with seven years old had been investigated; they were also divided into two groups: literate and non-literate children. First, we applied the Teste de Desempenho Escolar (TDE) in order to know the level of the reading and writing acquisition of the participants and then form the two groups. All children were interviewed individually in two sessions, they had been asked to perform four tasks: two of epilinguistic nature and two of metalinguistic nature. In the epilinguistic tasks, children should only identify the textual various genres and the incompleteness of stories. In the metalinguistic tasks, beyond identifying the absence and presence of parts of stories, children still would have to justify their answers. The hypothesis was that the non-literate children would have a better performance in the tasks of epilinguistic nature, on the other hand, they would have difficulties in tasks of metalinguistic nature. Moreover, the literate children would have a good performance such in the epilinguistic tasks as in the metalinguistic ones. The results had indicated that the non-literate children could competently perform the epilinguistic activities, although, as expected, they had presented difficulties in the metalinguistic activities. Furthermore, when requested to justify their answers, the children of this group were based predominantly on an indefinite criteria or related to the content of the text, showing that their knowledge of the typical textual structure of stories is still epilinguistic. The literate children, in turn, have not had any difficulties in the accomplishment of none of the tasks proposed and they had justified their answers by means of criteria of linguistic nature directed toward to the prototypical structure of stories. We conclude that literate children present a more sophisticated metatextual awareness than nonliterate children, confirming the initial hypothesis that literacy is an important factor in the transition from epilinguistic to metalinguistic behavior, relating to the knowledge on texts.

ASSUNTO(S)

epilinguistic metalinguÃstico consciÃncia metatextual literacy metalinguistic alfabetizaÃÃo psicologia cognitiva metatextual awareness epilinguÃstico

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