Main changes found in written narratives productions of children with reading/writing difficulties

ABSTRACT Purpose: to analyze the written narrative productions of children with reading/writing difficulties. Methods: the study was conducted on 171 children enrolled in the 4th or 5th grade of elementary school. The children were divided into two groups: G1 consisted of children without reading/writing difficulties and G2 consisted of children with difficulties in these tasks. Each child was asked to write a text after observing a figure stimulus. The text was then analyzed using a protocol and the handwriting, spelling mistakes, linguistic variables and contents were evaluated. Results: changes in handwriting, a higher percentage of spelling mistakes and other types of mistakes were observed in G2; the same proportion as in G1 for the use of nouns, adjectives and pronouns, but difficulty in verb conjugation and in the use of temporal adverbs. Regarding content, G2 children only described the scene and demonstrated a limited vocabulary and poor creativity. Conclusion: the writing skills of children with reading/writing difficulties showed several flaws including: changes in handwriting, presence of misspellings and limitation in text construction, which was restricted to simple description of the stimulus, with little articulation of ideas and without creation of characters, time or place for their story. This set of flaws compromises the intelligibility of the text by the reader and demonstrates that the development of writing is a complex task for these children.