Phonological abilities and writing among portuguese preschool children

Abstract

While still at kindergarten, many children who possess some degree of phonemic awareness and are familiar with a few letters spontaneously begin to invent writing in which they use conventional letters to represent some of the sounds in words. Ferreiro (1984, 1988) and Ferreiro and Teberosky (1986) were among the first researchers to study children's early ideas about written language, prior to formal education. Their work suggests that children's knowledge of written language evolves along a path over the course of which children think about the nature of writing and build up conceptual hypotheses that reflect an active reconstruction of the logic of the units that are represented by written language.This evolutionary path has been identified for a wide range of languages, including French (Besse, 1996;Chauveau & Rogovas-Chauveau, 1994;Fijalkow, 1993), Portuguese (Alves Martins, 1993), Italian (Pontecorvo & Orsolini, 1996), Hebrew (Tolchinsky, 1995 and English (Sulzby, 1989). Albeit there are some differences in the manner in which these authors define the number and characteristics of the levels of written language development, there are certain similarities in their positions.Generically speaking, in their attempts at writing children begin by using sequences of letters that imitate words by allocating them a communicational meaning. In this level children

Letter names and sounds: their implications for the phonetisation process

“…As it had in previous studies (Silva & Alves Martins, 2002Alves Martins & Silva, 2006a, 2006b, the intervention methodology we used enabled the children to re-equate their knowledge about the nature of writing and to progress towards the understanding that writing is a way of codifying speech, and that the letters which are used should represent sounds that are identified in words. This happened even though most of the children reached this understanding in accordance with a syllabic hypothesis-which was natural since the comparison words written by the hypothetical child also conformed to syllabic criteria.…”

“…The quality of this invented spelling is an indicator of children's phonological abilities, and simultaneously reveals the way in which children look at the nature of the written code and is an important predictor of their success at learning to read and write (Alves Martins, 1996;Mann, 1993). At the same time, preschool children's writing activities act as a factor in the development of more explicit forms of phonemic awareness (Adams, 1990;Alves Martins & Silva, 2006a, 2006bSilva & Alves Martins, 2002Treiman, Tincoff, & Richmond-Welty, 1997), inasmuch as they induce metalinguistic thinking practices that have consequences for the learning of the oral segments of words. In this sense children seem to find it easier to develop alphabetic analytical procedures in writing activities rather than in reading ones, given that writing "may prompt children to use more systematic methods of deriving the spelling from sounds" (Bowman & Treiman, 2002, p. 31).…”

Do young children spell words syllabically? Evidence from learners of Brazilian Portuguese

“…Support for the idea that children pass through a syllabic stage comes from studies showing relatively high proportions of syllabic spellers among learners of Romance languages who are around 4 and 5 years of age. For example, more than half of the Portuguese kindergartners tested by Martins and Silva (2006b) were identified as syllabic spellers.…”

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

“…The studies conducted by Alves Martins and Silva (2001, 2006a, 2006b) and by Silva andAlves Martins (2002, 2003) in the European Portuguese language, also prove that spelling activities improve phonological skills. The authors undertook intervention programmes designed to lead the quality of preschool children's invented spellings to evolve.…”