In this article, Sofía Vernon and Emilia Ferreiro present the results of an experimental study that looks at the relationship between the development of phonological awareness and the development of writing in Spanish-speaking kindergartners. The results of this study speak to the ongoing controversy about approaches to early literacy instruction — that is, whether children's ability to segment words into phonemes (phonological awareness) is a prerequisite for learning how to read and write. These results show that phonological awareness is not an either/or phenomenon, but that it develops across levels and that this development is related to children's writing development. Vernon and Ferreiro discuss several important educational implications based on their findings: first, that children's ability to benefit from systematic phonics instruction depends on their level of writing development; and second, that encouraging children to write in kindergarten and first grade is an important way to stimulate the analysis of spoken words or other meaningful units.

No abstract

La adquisición de la representación escrita del lenguaje ha sido tradicionalmente considerada como una adquisición escolar (es decir, como un aprendizaje que se desarrolla, de principio a fin, dentro del contexto escolar). Ahora bien, sabemos que no hay prácticamente dominios, entre los conocimientos fundamentales, para los cuales podamos identificar un inicio propiamente escolar. En todos los dominios en donde la investigación psicogenética ha aportado hechos sólidos, los orígenes del conocimiento han podido ser identificados antes del inicio de la escolarización. En el presente artículo, por una parte, se justifica hablar de una evolución de la escritura en el niño, evolución influenciada aunque no enteramente determinada por la acción de las instituciones educativas, y por otra, se sustenta que al nivel de la comprensión de lo escrito, el niño encuentra y debe resolver problemas de naturaleza lógica como cualquier otro dominio del conocimiento.

No abstract

The results of research with 4- to 6-year-old, Spanish-speaking children, aimed at investigating the meaning they attach to the segmentation of a written sentence, are classified in six developmentally ordered categories of responses. Children who cannot yet read (in the conventional sense) nevertheless have very precise ideas about what can be found in a written text. They do not deal with the different parts of a sentence in the same manner: at first children do not expect the verb to be written; then the verb is supposed to be graphically represented, but articles are not. Acquiring knowledge about the writing system is a cognitive process that appears to be very close in nature to those studied within the framework of Piaget's theory.