Orthographic and metaphonological competences: influences and correlations with reading and writing abilities of 4th grade students

摘要

PURPOSE: To study the performance of 4th grade students on reading, writing and phonological awareness tasks. METHODS: Thirty-two 4th grade children (50% of each gender), with ages between nine and 11 years, were evaluated according to the following procedure: anamnesis, reading and writing task (54 linguistic tokens), and phonological awareness task. The students were divided into two research groups and two comparison groups: GPI: carried out the writing task first, and then the reading task; GPII: completed the reading, followed by the writing task; GCI: completed only the writing items; GCII: completed only the reading items. RESULTS: In the writing task, GPII showed the highest rates of correct answers, and GPI, GPII and GCI had better performances in writing high frequency words, followed by pseudowords and low frequency words. The reading evaluation showed that the performances of GPI, GPII and GCII were similar, and GPI and GPII had more correct answers for pseudowords, followed by high frequency words. The correlation between phonological awareness and writing was moderate, while correlations between phonological awareness and reading, and writing and reading were very weak. CONCLUSION: Phonological awareness was moderately correlated to the performance on the writing task, and weakly correlated to the performance on the reading task. The psycholinguistic feature low familiarity determined the highest error averages, both in reading and writing tasks.