Letter names and sounds: their implications for the phonetisation process

Abstract

Our aim was to analyse the impact of the characteristics of words used in spelling programmes and the nature of instructional guidelines on the evolution from grapho-perceptive writing to phonetic writing in preschool children. The participants were 50 5-year-old children, divided in five equivalent groups in intelligence, phonological skills and spelling. All the children knew the vowels and the consonants B, D, P, R, T, V, F, M and C, but didn't use them on spelling. Their spelling was evaluated in a pre and post-test with 36 words beginning with the consonants known. In-between they underwent a writing programme designed to lead them to use the letters P and T to represent the initial phonemes of words. The groups differed on the kind of words used on training (words whose initial syllable matches the name of the initial letter-Exp. G1 and Exp. G2-versus words whose initial syllable is similar to the sound of the initial letter-Exp. G3 and Exp. G4). They also differed on the instruction used in order to lead them to think about the relations between the initial phoneme of words and the initial consonant (instructions designed to make the children think about letter names-Exp. G1 and Exp. G3 -versus instructions designed to make the children think about letter sounds-Exp. G2 and Exp. G4). The 5th was a control group. All the children evolved to syllabic phonetisations spellings. There are no differences between groups at the number of total phonetisations but we found some differences between groups at the quality of the phonetisations.

Conceptualizações sobre linguagem escrita – Percursos de investigação

“…Nesta linha de pensamento, desenvolvemos programas de escrita com crianças em idade pré-escolar, que não relacionam ainda a linguagem escrita com a linguagem oral ou que o fazem ainda de forma incipiente, utilizando poucas letras convencionais na sua escrita (Alves Martins & Silva, 2006a,b;Silva, 2003;Silva & Alves Martins, 2002, 2003Silva, Almeida, & Alves Martins, 2010).…”

Variation and repetition in the spelling of young children

“…At first glance, stronger evidence that prephonological spellers deliberately arrange letters in different combinations so as to represent different words comes from data mentioned by Silva, Almeida, and Alves Martins (2010). These researchers stated that 50 of the 87 Portuguese prereaders (mean age around 5½ years) who they screened for inclusion in a training study initially used different combinations of letters when asked to write different words but did not use phonologically plausible letters.…”

Invented spelling programmes and the access to the alphabetic principle in kindergarten.

“…In fact, Martins, Silva and Pereira (2010) and Silva, Almeida and Alves Martins (2010) verified, for the Portuguese language, that the phonetization procedures extended to other phonemes that were not object of intervention.…”