SYNTACTIC AWARENESS EVALUATION IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE DISCUSSIONS ABOUT THE PREDICTION OF INITIAL READING AND WRITING LEARNING

Abstract

ABSTRACT

This study, included in the area of Language Acquisition, sub-area of Psycholinguistics, with an internal interface with the syntax and external with Cognitive Psychology aimed to evaluate the variable syntactic awareness and its relations with other linguistic-cognitive variables: phonological awareness, selective attention and working memory, in the framework of the discussions about the prediction of initial reading and writing learning, anchored in reading processing models (GOMBERT, 2003; PEREIRA, 2010 SCLIAR-CABRAL, 2008) and acquisition and learning of reading and writing.(FERREIRO, TEBEROSKY, 1999, KATO, 1986). With regard to syntactic awareness, the documented studies in the scientific literature are still quite controversial (REGO, 1995, 1997; BOWEY, 2005). There is a vast literature that investigates phonological awareness and, on the order hand, few studies that evaluate syntactic awareness. This study was a field study, both quantitative and qualitative approach, of an exploratory, descriptive and longitudinal type. The participants were twenty-two (22) children, at the age of 6-7 years old, who were submitted to the administration of neuropsychological tests at two moments: beginning of the first year of literacy and beginning of the second year of literacy, in order to analyze in a longitudinal way the child's learning. At first, were evaluated the following variables: syntactic awareness; phonological awareness; reading; written; selective attention; visual-spatial working memory; and phonological work memory. After that, the variables with the respective instruments already mentioned were reassessed: reading, writing and syntactic awareness. The collected data were tabulated and processed qualitatively and quantitatively through the descriptive analysis and the correlational analysis using the Pearson Correlation Coefficient. From the cross-sectional and longitudinal perspective of our results, both quantitative and qualitative analysis, children with higher levels of syntactic awareness, at the first moment of the tests application, present better performance in acquisition and learning of reading and writing when compared to children with low scores in syntactic awareness. Also, considering the results in syntactic awareness and reading and writing, we observed that the results in the tests were better in the second moment, when compared to the first moment in both variables. Our explanatory hypothesis for this phenomenon may lie in the relationship of reciprocity between the syntactic consciousness and the teaching of the writing system. In other words, good levels of syntactic awareness contribute to the acquisition and learning of reading and writing, and this, in turn, helps to increase syntactic awareness. The results achieved show that, although phonological awareness has a greater predictive potential, there is a set of linguistic and cognitive factors that predict further performance in reading and writing, and also reveals that syntactic awareness, despite having weak correlations, shows great significance and an important role in predicting the initial learning of reading and writing, and must not be neglected.