First literacy and psycogenetic models to explain leanguage reflection.

CASTEDO, MIRTA

Exeter

Exposición; Lecture at the Centre for Research in Writing; 2016

University of Exeter. College of Social Sciences and International Studies

Nowadays, there are two perspectives that account for the psychologic processes in the early literacy: phonological awareness and psychogenesis. Each one of them promotes its own teaching approach where reflection about language is conceived in different ways. This work intends to offer an overview of the educational intervention in both perspectives, considering the transformations occurred in the last decades, especially in relation to the presence of writing in the teaching tasks and the analysis implied in them. Secondly, although methodologically speaking the comparative learning research is complex, some results in connection with the students´ achievements are retrieved, while their limits are highlighted. ***Phonological awareness and psychogenesis are two perspectives that account for the psychological processes of early literacy. They are two different theories that start from two opposite concepts and understanding of the written language and the learning process of writing. The ?theoretical? approaches of teaching that relate to each one of them are also different ?as the current practices in the classroom are far from both of them. On the one hand, phonological awareness (PA), in its early research, said that the ability to analyse the phonological structure of the spoken words would make it easier for the child to discover the alphabetical principle of writing. Other authors went beyond that, because they considered that PA correlates or produces the acquisition of writing. As the pieces of work multiply, the idea that the PA is formed by a group of abilities of different levels of difficulty and different order of appearance in the development, something that had not been considered at an early stage, became clear. That relation is still subject of debate, because some believe that PA, reading and writing are developed reciprocally, while others still support the principle of precedence. In the latest works, not only reading but also writing have taken on greater relevance in cognitive studies: they point out that the progress in children´s writings is favoured by the knowledge of the names of the letters and they understand that such knowledge, together with PA, are the best predictors of the progress of writing acquisition. The teaching approaches promoted from this perspective are characterized by the direct instruction of the elements of the writing system. The attention payed by the so-called ?smaller units? implies the teaching of basic abilities, such as phonological codification, letter tracing, and writing of words. From its origins, they included a strong work of phonological analysis so that children could isolate phonic segments within the words. In the last few years, an identification of the alphabet´s letters, their names and graphic features, both in upper and lower case, and the relation between the letters with the spelling of high-frequency words and, in English, with more regular spelling patterns are also included.On the other hand, psychogenetic research emphasizes that the relation between the levels of segmentation of speech and the levels of writing is a dialectic, and non-lineal relation. In order to understand writing as it currently exists in the society, we need to discover that the segmentations of words go ?beyond? the syllable ?natural unit? and must be located on an abstract level (because it is sometimes impossible to pronounce) of differentiations difficult to hear and see on the level of articulation. The teaching approaches promoted by this perspective are characterized by the implicit teaching of the elements of the writing system and its relations. The reflection on the writing system is based on the sustained intervention of the teacher who fosters the differed reflection at the moment of the written production, that is to say, after producing writings in the context of practices as using their name to identify their belongings, producing or interpreting work schedules, lists of book titles, taking notes in the form of lists, tables or labels of topics to study, etc. The source of reflection is based on the shared experience of interpretation and production, where ?what it says? and ?how it is written? (which letter, how many, in what order) is negotiated. The teaching research has developed a typology of interventions where language becomes the object of reflection. This typology has the special feature of diversifying according to the levels of conceptualization of the writing system. Finally, we make a brief reference to comparative research on the incidence of the teaching approaches in early literacy by collecting results of recent studies, where significant differences and methodological limits as well as other relevant findings are observed.