THE ORDER OF THE LETTERS IN THE WRITTEN PRODUCTION: WHAT CHILDREN IN THE LITERACY PROCESS SAY
literacy; writing levels; letter order
This exploratory research, of psychogenetic nature, aimed to comprehensively analyze the conceptualizations of Brazilian children who already phoneticize writing when faced with the challenge of deciding in which order the letters should be placed in the written production. The participating children were 6 and 7 years old and were in the first year of elementary school. The investigation took place in a public school in Itaberaba, a city in the Bahia countryside, and the sample consisted of eleven children in the syllabic and syllabic-alphabetic levels of conceptualization. An initial diagnosis was made to identify the children's writing levels, and from that three tasks were proposed individually on two consecutive days: production of the first version of a list of seven animal names, production of the second version of the same list, and revision of the writing. The words on the list were selected to contemplate a variety of syllabic structures ‒ including CV, CVC, CVV, V, VC, in order to analyze how the children represented each one of them in their written productions ‒ and the relations with the particularities of Brazilian Portuguese. Thus, the research procedures enabled the production of data about the reflections made by the children and the decisions made about the order of the letters in the words. The results highlighted the power of the writing moments on their own, made by the children, and how much the review of their own writings potentiates the reflection about how many, which, and what the order of the letters in their written production. The results also showed that the order issues faced by the children in their written production are driven by internal conceptualizations and also by particularities related to the characteristics of Brazilian Portuguese ‒ in the case of this research, the mother tongue. Throughout the research, we tried to consider the children's ideas, as a political decision to give them the right to be heard and understood.