A relação entre consciência fonêmica e fluência da leitura

Abstract

Reading fluency is the ability to read a text accurately and with adequate speed. In alphabetic languages, such as Portuguese, the ability to fluently read words depends on learning three skills: i) comprehension of the alphabetic principle; ii) decoding capabilities; iii) the mental lexicon of spelling. The early reader should be taught that speech can be segmented into phonemes, which are represented in writing by graphemes. Later, the apprentice reader must learn to assimilate the valences between graphemes and phonemes to be able to decode words. In addition to grapho-phonological correspondences, the reader should learn the orthographic properties of words that enable reading irregular words, i.e. words whose spelling needs to be memorized. Phonological awareness is the ability to manipulate speech sounds in three levels: syllabic, intra-syllabic and phonemic. The present study investigates phonological awareness at the phonemic level; it is the level at which sound is analyzed in its smallest unit of meaning. There is a direct relationship between phonological awareness and the development of reading ability, and there are three major views on this relationship: i) causality; ii) consequence; iii) reciprocity. In this research, we evaluated 30 children who were enrolled in the third year of elementary school of a public school; the goal was to evaluate their level of phonemic awareness and their fluency in word and pseudoword reading. The experimental procedures were as follows: 1) collection of information on the academic performance of students by means of the perception of their teachers, especially related to reading; 2) assessment of phonological awareness skills - initial phoneme identification, final phoneme identification, phonemic synthesis and phonemic segmentation; 3) evaluation of picture and digit naming speeds; 4) evaluation of speed and accuracy of word reading; 5) evaluation of speed and accuracy of pseudoword reading. The results showed significant correlation between performance on phonemic awareness tasks, mainly in identification of rhyme and segmentation, with the accuracy of reading words and pseudo words. The results underscore the importance of phonemic awareness for the development of accurate reading There was no significant correlation of speed of reading (decoding and semantic access) with rapid naming and with the degree of development of phonemic awareness.