Phonological abilities in literate and iliterate children

Purpose:  to verify the levels of phonological abilities in literate and illiterate children from a municipal school in Recife and to analyze the variables that can act on the performance.

Methods:  the studied sample was made up by 20 children, ten literate and ten illiterate, between six and eleven years old. A test of phonological awareness was applied considering as variables the students age, parents’ schooling, parents’ accompaniment of the student academic performance.

Results:  testing results of phonological awareness showed that the literate children had better performance in segmentation of sentences in word, syllabic detection, syllabic reversion, phonemic exclusion, phonemic detection and phonemic synthesis. The illiterate children had a better performance in rhyme detection. None of the children groups was able to do the phonemic reversion.

Conclusion:  it was found that the literate children showed higher phonological abilities and that outside factors like the socio-economic-cultural level, lack of stimulation on the teach-learning and distortion grade/age apparently helped to the low performance of the studied subjects.

KEYWORDS:
Language; Language Tests; Reading; Handwriting