Teaching and learning spelling: an analysis of 6th grade students' writing

Abstract

Understanding how students acquire orthographic knowledge has become an area of interest for many teachers, especially Portuguese language teachers. As different theorists have argued, a reflective teaching-learning process is important, enabling students to understand graphophonemic relationships and overcome the obstacles that can arise in appropriating knowledge of orthographic conventions. This paper presents the results of a study which aimed to: Identify the most productive spelling changes in the writing of 6th grade students. The investigative analysis, carried out by means of quantitative-descriptive and field research, was based on eight written productions by 6th grade students from a public and state school in Piauí. The theoretical framework was based on studies by authors such as Cagliari (1994), Zorzi (1998, 2009, 2018), Morais (1999, 2000, 2007), Simões (2006), among others. This research, like the studies by Zorzi (1998, 2009), Miranda, Medina and Silva (2005), Quadros (2015), concluded that multiple representations, resulting from the arbitrariness of the system, are the most recurrent types of errors in the written productions of elementary school students. In view of this, it is argued that these errors should be understood as hypotheses that students formulate in order to acquire knowledge of the written language.