HOW DO CHILDREN TAUGHT WITH A PHONIC METHOD ANSWER TASKS WHICH EVALUATE PHONEMIC AWARENESS?

ABSTRACT: We discuss the relationships between several abilities of phonemic awareness and reading performance showed by 20 children who were concluding first grade, having understood the alphabetic principle, and who were taught with phonic methods in public schools. They answered nine phonemic awareness tasks and three reading tasks (words, phrases and text). In most phonemic awareness tasks average performance was equal or less than 60%. Children only read well in the words task and it correlated with few abilities of phonemic awareness. Qualitative analysis showed that children thought mainly about letters or syllables and hardly could pronounce phonemes. Our data question the relevance of methods of literacy teaching which emphasize the pronunciation of isolated phonemes as a requisite for the learning of reading and writing in Portuguese.