Bilingual German-Portuguese children: handwriting mistakes and characteristics of the familiar environment

摘要

PURPOSE: To relate mistakes in Portuguese writing, characteristics of the familiar environment, age and gender of bilingual German-Portuguese children. METHODS: Twenty bilingual children were submitted to balanced dictation, and their parents answered a questionnaire. The analysis classified and quantified the types of errors in Portuguese writing, which was later related to their parents' answers on the questionnaire. RESULTS: There were fewer errors related to change, random substitution, inversion, transposition, omission and adding of graphemes, and more errors associated with Portuguese irregularities. Most parents had written material at home; when more than one person used to read at home and the highest the fathers' level of schooling, the greater the number of children with fewer errors in writing; the lower the maternal level of schooling, the greater the number of students with more writing errors. Younger children had more errors of all kinds. Boys had more writing errors than girls. CONCLUSIONS: Even though all the participants of this study were bilingual, the majority of the findings corroborated researches with monolingual Brazilian Portuguese speaking children.