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Thursday stream 4-6 Session 11.35 - 12.50 Length 25 minutes
Fernando C. Capovilla and Alessandra G. S. Capovilla
University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil capovilla@usp.br
Abstract
In Brazil, after almost two decades of the adoption of the "Constructivist" approach to literacy acquisition, which fails to take advantage of orthographic regularity, recent surveys suggest that the average national reading and spelling skills have dropped significantly. The present intervention study is aimed at taking advantage of the orthographic regularity of Brazilian Portuguese, and of previous studies conducted in this country and around the world showing a strong relationship between phonological awareness skills and reading and spelling skills. The effects of an 18-session phonological-awareness training upon skills of four to eight year-old Portuguese speaking Brazilian children were assessed. Skills included phonological awareness, reading aloud, spelling under dictation, letter knowledge, phonological coding in working memory, and phonological access to long-term memory. On the basis of phonological-awareness pretest performance, each school level was divided into a below-average treatment group and two control groups, one above and one below average. Comparisons among groups indicated strong and significant training effects in children's phonological awareness, as well as in kindergartner's reading and spelling skills. After 10 hour training, the low-performing children became as proficient as their highest-performing peers. Four additional studies comparing global and phonics methods have been conducted in the public school system with even more promising results. Implications for the Brazilian National Curriculum will also be discussed.
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