Abstract

NAVA MARTINEZ, Rutilio. Development of writing for encoding and decoding in primary school children from Mérida, Yucatán. RIDE. Rev. Iberoam. Investig. Desarro. Educ [online]. 2021, vol.11, n.22, e056.  Epub Sep 20, 2021. ISSN 2007-7467.  https://doi.org/10.23913/ride.v11i22.921.

The objective of this work was to analyze the development and consolidation of writing in children. 546 children between the age of 6 to 12 years were evaluated using writing and reading tests in order to measure the number of spelling errors. In the results, it was found that children in lower grades frequently make natural spelling errors (modification that alters the phonology of the word, heterophone errors); and that all children make arbitrary spelling errors (substitution of a homophone letter). In particular, it was observed that second grade children do not identify misspelled words and that they are specialists in the use of dominant spellings to represent their respective phoneme. Heterophone and homophone errors decreased in fourth grade children, here there was a greater dominance of the phoneme-grapheme relationship and vice versa; furthermore, the spelling stage was observed at this age, since the children identified a greater number of misspelled words, compared to the second-grade children. The sixth graders showed an automation for writing and identifying lexical units as -ción, which means that they can read them as a whole and not as a sequence of grapheme-phoneme units. Finally, learning to write in the Spanish language is fast, the transition from the partial alphabetic stage to the spelling one takes two years. In some cases, however, individuals show difficulties or problems (dyslexia), so they continue to make natural spelling errors, despite being exposed to the same amount of text as their peers. These individuals with learning disabilities were noticeable in sixth grade.

Keywords : writing development; writing consolidation; spelling; spelling errors; orthography; reading and writing tests.