Andrea Oliveira Batista DESEMPENHO ORTOGRÁFICO DE ...

ABSTRACT
Regarding the importance of the written language to a child’s future life, the
verification of the orthographic level at different school years may bring information
about the process of teaching and learning nowadays, and, according to the literature
researches directed to orthographic acquisition, as codification process, are modest.
Therefore, this study intends to characterize and compare the orthographic
performance of 2 nd to 5 th grades public and private schools students, based on an
orthographic evaluation protocol specially elaborated for this purpose, following the
codification rules of Scliar-Cabral (2003a, 2003b) and the alphabetical principles of
Brazilian Portuguese. The specific orthographic tests were prepared using a word
bank built from textbooks and other school materials used by the students who
participated in this study. Two hundred and forty students from second to fifth grade
were evaluated, 120 from a private institution and 120 from a public institution, in
Londrina - PR, and 60 students were divided into eight groups, respectively GI, GII,
GIII, GIV, GV, GVI, GVII, GVIII. The tests of the protocol named Pró-Ortografia were
applied in the collective version: writing of alphabetic letters, dictation at random of
the letters of the alphabet, dictation of words, dictation of nonwords, dictation with
pictures and thematic writing induced by pictures, and in the individual version:
dictation of sentences, purposeful errors, spelling dictation and orthographic lexical
memory. The results were analyzed statistically, revealing that students from the
private and public schools presented similar orthographic performances at all the
collective and individual tests. Moreover, there was an increase on the average of
correct answers at all tests and a decrease on the average of writing errors according
to the advance of the grade level. Regarding the orthographic errors, based on their
semiology, it was verified a more often occurrence of Natural Orthography errors than
of Arbitrary Orthography, being errors of omission and addition of segments, of
univocal phoneme-grapheme correspondence, of improper separation and junction of
words and of alteration in the segments order. In relation to the Arbitrary
Orthography, there were found errors of phoneme-grapheme correspondence
dependent of the phonetic/position context in a larger number than the errors of
phoneme-grapheme correspondence independent of rules, followed by absence or
improper presence of accentuation. The results of this study establish that the
protocol was efficient to characterize the orthographic performance of the students
subject of the research. It was also possible to conclude that the students from public
schools and the ones from private school presented a similar average of correct
answers in all tests applied. Concerning the profile of orthographic performance of
the eight groups, we conclude that there were fewer, but discreet, indexes of
orthographic errors for the students from private school, which did not reveal strong
discrepancies between both teaching systems, demonstrating that it is still required
systematical methodologies of teaching which consider the orthography an object of
study, promoting its reflection by the students.
Keywords: Evaluation. Learning. Schooling. Handwriting.
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