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Poster P1

Thursday stream 4-6 Session 11.35 - 12.50 Length 25 minutes

The writing disorders and their evolutionary aspects for schoolchildren in Greece

A. Andreopoulou,V. Bougiotopoulou, Prof. As. O. Inshakova

Moscow Stage Pedagogical University, Russia bougiotopoulou@hotmail.com

Abstract

The aim of the study was to research the difficulties, which confront schoolchildren aged 7-9 years during the formation of the skills of writing. The study of the writing skills was carried out with specific texts for dictation, composition and copying. We have examined 610 pupils of the 2nd ,3rd and 4th class. 18% of these children continually made specific writing mistakes (dysgraphia).70% are boys and 30% are girls. Furthermore, 40% of the children in the 2nd class,34.6% of the children in the 3rd class and 22,4% of the children in the 4th class showed writing disorders. The most frequent mistakes were those connected with the disturbance of lingual analysis and synthesis: Wrong stress-marks; Vague and separately writing of some words; Missing out and permutation of letters and syllables. Errors in writing letters with the same sound or pronunciation were less common. The main obstacle to successful development of writing skills of schoolchildren is the incapability to analyze verbal speech and particularly its rhythmic-intonation part.

The dynamics of contemporary life, the steadily increasing volume of information, the development of new forms of knowledge acquisition presuppose and require correct writing and reading skills and highlight the predominance of the written word in the life of contemporary people. The means of effective education and cure of dyslectic children's writing and reading are increasingly becoming the concern of a large number of scientific fields.

Writing is one of the most complex forms of language activity. It constitutes a complex psycho-physiological multi-level process. The spoken word is decoded and symbolized in writing with set graphemes. According to A. R. Luria writing goes through three basic levels before being completed:
Sound-acoustic phonological analysis. Decoding and equivalence of the split phoneme with the visual form of the grapheme.

Decoding of the visual form of the grapheme into a kinetic form of successive movements.

The level of sound-acoustic-phonological analysis is a person's ability to recognize and pick out a specific phoneme from the continuous stream of the spoken word as well as the ability of comparing this particular sound with acoustically similar ones.

The phonological analysis is realized through acoustic- articulative channel with its active participation the articulation clarifies the character of the sound, helps in its separation from the other acoustically similar sounds, these transforming the sound to steady phoneme.

The next stage in the writing process is the equivalence and the decoding of phoneme into grapheme. This decoding is completed with the participation of the formative qualities and the placement of this grapheme's elements in space. Special difficulties at this particular level lie in the writing of letters which have similarities of form.

The third and final level of writing skill acquisition is the decoding of the visual form of the grapheme into a kinetic figure of successive movements. This stabilizes through kinesthetic control, which in turn stabilizes through visual controI (B. G. Ananev, A. R. Luria, L. C. Tsvetkova, C. M. Blinkov, E. C. Bein, J. M. Vinarskaya, R. I. Lalaeva)

That is how the process of the writing functions. If one of these levels of writing and reading acquisition is not realized or completed, the result will be automatic disturbance of writing and reading.

The word's sound structure modelization procedure is not the same for all languages. This mainly depends on the principles on which the proper writing of each language is based.

According to this ,one of the basic purposes was analyzing the principles which rule the Greek and Russian writing and comparing them with one another.

After serious theoretical analysis and elaboration of the bibliography we reached the conclusion that both in the Greek and Russian language, writing is based on the following basic principles: Phonological , morphological and historical principle.

The phonological principle includes the total and consecutive correspondence of sounds and letters. According to this principle, each sound is always symbolized with one and only grapheme. In other words, words are written exactly as they sound. This is the way in which the thematic part of words is written in the Greek language.

The analysis of the phonological system of the Greek and Russian language, allowed us to conclude that Greek has similar phonological system to the Russian language.

Consequently, we can use the theoretical and practical experience of the Russian logopedic science in order to determine the dyslexic writing mistakes of the Greek language.

The purpose of the research is the investigation of the writing skill in 7 to 10 year old pupils in the process of acquiring this skill.

The examination method was based on the analysis and recording on specific mistakes in specifically processed texts: dictation, copying, written texts and composition writing. We studies the mistake made by each pupil in a total of 9 assignments :three dictations, three copying exercises and three compositions. The assignments were given at the beginning, in the middle at the end of the school year. The number of the assignments and the time they were given of were chosen with a new to ascertaining specific mistakes of a steady and repetitive nature.

The phonological constitution, the structure and volume of the verbal material of the texts were chosen on the basis of the Greek phonological system, the level of knowledge and the age of the pupils.

For the analysis and classification of the specific writing mistakes made by the pupils we used the 'Classification of the specific writing mistake's by R.I.Lalaeva(1992) which shows the mechanics of writing disturbance.

According to R.I. Lalaeva we can classify in the following groups all the mistakes from the logopedics point of view which characterize the writing disturbances of dyslexic pupils.

The first group consists of the mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in phonological perception. This weakness is expressed by mistake of confusion and replacement of letters which have articulated and sound similarity.

The second group consists of mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in phonological analysis and synthesis. This weakness is expressed by mistakes of mission, permutation and additions of letters, syllables and accent mark.

The third group consists of mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in the comprehension of the structure of the sentence. This weakness is expressed by mistakes of splitting , merging and omitting words.

The fourth group consists of mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in setting limits of a sentence in a text. This weakness is expressed by mistakes of omission of capital letters, mistakes in capital letters, omissions and mistakes in using the full stops.

The fifth group consists of mistakes which appear due to weakness in visual analysis and synthesis. This weakness is expressed by mistakes of confusion and replacement of words with visual and kinetic writing similarities. The investigation includes a specimen of 610 B' ,C', and D' class pupils attending elementary school in Greece.

While processing the data, we gave each mistake one point. The biggest total of points expresses the bigger number of mistakes.

In this paper the statistical anaysis was made entirely by Prof. Dr. A. Petrakis PhD in Mathematics (Institute of Technological Education - Department of Sciences) using the following software :

SPSS software product version 10.0. The SPSS is a comprehensive system for analyzing data. SPSS can take data and use them to generate tabulated reports, charts, and plots of distributions and trends, descriptive statistics, and complex statistical analyses. The STATVIEW Professional, Graphic, Statistics Utility for excellent graphics.The MS EXCEL product for creating tables.

We have used the unpaired two tail Student's t-test for testing null hypotheses for the mean of two variables and also used the one ANOVA and F-distribution (Fisher) for testing null hypotheses for the mean of three or more variables.

The results of the research showed that:18% of the students made specific writing mistakes, of a steady and repetitive nature (dysgraphia). 70% of the specimen were boys and 30% girls. Writing disturbances were observed in 43% of B' class pupils, 34.6% of C' class pupils and 22.45 of D' class pupils. The percentage of dyslexic children decreases by half from B to D class.

The greatest percentage of the total number of mistaken consists of dyslexic mistakes, m=19.28, yielding a percentage of 73.47%. The remaining 26.53%5 consists of spelling mistakes(i.e. historic writing mistakes and grammar mistakes) and is expressed with an average value of m=7.11.Dyslexic mistakes are characterized by steadiness from class to class, the average being :in B' class m=18.5 in C' class m=17 and in D' class m=22.10.

Studying the dyslexic mistakes we conclude that the mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in phonological analysis and synthesis m=10.22, take the first place and take the 52.54% of the total dyslexic mistakes. In classes these mistakes are divided as follows : in B' class the average rate is m=10.80, in C class the average rate is m=7.88 and finally in D' class the average rate is m=11.86.

The second place is taken by the mistakes which derive due to weakness in the comprehension the structure of a sentence. The average rate of these mistakes is m=4.86 and these mistakes take the 25.49% of the total number of dyslexic mistakes. This error division in classes indicate the following picture: In B' class m=4.96, in C' class m=4.30 and in D' class m=5.28.

The third place is taken by the mistakes which derive and relate due to weakness in setting the limits to a sentence in a text m=1.77. These mistakes take the 9.16% of the total dyslexic mistakes. In classes the average rate is defined as follows: in B' class the average rate is m=1.49, in C' class m=1.51 and in D' class m=2.28.

The forth place is taken by the errors which derive and are relative due to weakness in phonological perception m=1.57. The 6.82% of total dyslexic errors is taken by these mistakes. In B' m=1.10 in C' m=1.42 and in D' m=1.44.

Finally the fifth place is taken by the errors which are related and derive due to weakness in visual analysis and synthesis m=1.15. These mistakes take the 6.06% of the total dyslexic errors. In classes the average rate is defined as follows: in B' class m=0.88, in C' class m=1.48 and in D' class m=1.08.

Examining analytically the errors of the first group which derive due to weakness in phonological analysis and synthesis we can say that the majority of these mistakes is expressed by omissions m=8.50, permutations m=0.93 and additions m=0.78.

The corresponding percentage is 43.74%, 4.77% and 4.02%. In the middle of this group the majority of mistakes take the omission errors of accent marks m=7.18 and the percentage is 36.84%.

The mistakes which are noted in letter omissions are less m=1.18 and correspond to the 6.09%. Next are the mistakes of permutations of accent marks m=0.7 with a percentage of 3.74%.

Next are the errors which are noted in letter additions m=0.45 with a percentage of 4.30%. Next are the errors which are done in addition of syllables m=0.33 with a percentage of 1.72%.

The less mistakes which are included in this group are the mistakes of omitting syllables m=0.15 and errors of permutations of syllables m=0.02 with percentages of 0.81% and 0.11%.

In the second large error group which are done due to weakness in the comprehension of the structure of the sentence the majority of errors in this group take the merging errors of words m=2.86; next are the mistakes of splitting the words m=1.28 and last are the mistakes of omitting words m=0.81. The percentages are 14.69%, 6.60% and 4.20%.

As far as the 3rd group's mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness in setting the limits of a sentence in a text, we notice almost the same number of mistakes in writing the capital letter m=0.94 and in full stop mistakes m=0.08. These mistakes take the 4.92% and 4.22% of all dyslexic errors. The writing errors of capital letters are expressed with omissions m=0.80 and errors in the use of a capital letter m=0.15 take the 4.14% and 0.78% correspondingly. Almost the same picture is shown with mistakes in the use of a full stop which is expressed by omissions of a full stop m=0.74 and with transposing the full stop m=0.07 the percentage is 3.81% and 0.41.

In the forth group which relates to mistakes in phonological perception we notice that the majority of them is related to the replacement of consonants with an average rate m=0.99 and percentage of 3.79% and with replacement of vowels with an average rate of m=0.58 and a percentage of 3.03%.

The mistakes of replacing consonants are expressed by replacing letters which have articulated similarity m=0.69 and percentage 2.22% and letter replacement which have acoustic similarity m=0.30 percentage of 1.57%.

In the fifth group of dyslexic mistakes which are related and derive due to weakness to visual analysis and synthesis we notice that the majority of these mistakes is related to word confusion which have kinetic similarity m=0.97 and correspond to the 4.98% of dyslexic errors. A bit less are the mistakes which are related with word confusion having visual similarity m=0.20 and which correspond to 1.03% of dyslexic errors.

In conclusion we can say that the most important obstacles in the process of dyslectic children acquiring effective writing skills are:
-incapacity for correct articulation
-defective speech articulation
-incapacity for phonological comprehension, phonological analysis and synthesis.
-defective rhythmic-intonation of speech.
-incapacity for syllabic analysis and synthesis of words.
-incapacity for the comprehension of the sentence structure of the speech.
-defective development of the grammatical structure of speech.
-incapacity of visual
- spatial perception.

It is evident that the level of development and completion of the linguistic functions plays an important role in the successful acquisition and completion of writing.

Bibliography

1. Ananev B.G.(1960) "An analyses of the difficulties faced by pupils in their efford to learn how to read and write." Moscow :Academy of Pedagogical Sciences , (in Russian language)

2. Levina R.E (1963) "The effects of speech delay on the writing learning procedures." //Special School , (in Russian language)

3. Levina R.E (1971) " Writing disorders in school children"// Defectology N 5, (in Russian language)

4. Luria A.R. (1950) "A study on the psycho-physiology of writing" Moscow :Academy of Pedagogical Sciences , (in Russian language)

5. Luria A.R. (1969)"Higher cortical functions in man and their disturbances in local lesions." Moscow: Press Moscow University,(in Russian language)

6. Luria A.R (1975) "Brain and memory" , Moscow :Press Moscow University (in Russian language)

7. Lalaeva R.I.(1986)"Aspects of study of written speech disturbances in children " // "Study and therapy of speech disturbances" Leningrad, (in Russian language) **Petrakis A. Contact person for the statistical model in data analysis. : petrakis @hotmail.com