Processos psicolinguísticos envolvidos na compreensão do princípio alfabético: um estudo sobre tarefas de alfabetização

Abstract

The didactic book (DB) is a cultural product and an important support in organizing the pedagogical work of literacy teachers. It often becomes the only educational resource available to promote teaching and learning. We start from the assumption that this resource can be used as a support tool for literacy teachers, in an attempt to supply some formative aspects or facilitate the school pedagogical organization. However, to accomplish this, it must contain information and suggestions that help teachers in this endeavor. Given this context, this research aimed to identify the linguistic knowledge and / or psycholinguistic understandings that are stimulated by means of the resolution of the tasks proposed in the textbooks used in a municipal school of a city in the southwest of Paraná. The research is based on psycholinguistics, developmental psychology and cognitive psychology findings. We sought to establish a dialogue between different perspectives, we consider it is possible to build a broader understanding of the appropriation of the writing system if we take into account the findings of authors who carried out their research from different standpoints. In general, these investigations show the existence of a close relation between the development of metalinguistic skills and children’s understandings about the nature of the writing system. Thus, in the textbooks, we selected the tasks that involved the use of metalinguistic skills, especially phonological awareness, checking which ones had the potential for developing the alphabetic principle. We analyzed the textbooks of the 1st years of Elementary Education of the Aprende Brasil Teaching System, adopted in the 2030 School Program, implemented in the municipality. We found that the didactic book suggests letters recognition tasks that promote the visual identification of their graphic form and the knowledge of their name. It also proposes some tasks at the level of intrasyllabic units (rhymes and alliterations) using texts such as poems and tongue twisters. These, in addition to implicitly promoting textual and syntactic awareness, contribute to the development of phonological awareness, as they involve children and lead them to focus attention on the sounds of the language. Regarding the development of phonemic awareness, the DB proposes several phonological recoding tasks that have the potential to promote phonemic awareness based on the knowledge of the relations between graphemes and phonemes. However, we noticed some shortcomings related to the teaching of writing in an alphabetic system, such as the lack of clarity in the purpose of the tasks, in the light of scientific knowledge about the process of mastering that system. Above all, we observed the lack of more explicit guidance for teachers regarding the potential of the tasks, by explaining what is really important in these tasks, so that teachers could modify them, expand them or produce other similar ones, based on the children's needs. We is expected that this research can contribute to the awareness of literacy teachers about the relation between theoretical knowledge and pedagogical practice, in order to choose, evaluate and create activities directed to the children’s specific needs.