Spelling in the classroom: what texts produced by elementary school students reveal

Abstract

There was a time when the teacher was very strict about the students' spelling, however if the students demonstrated not to know the rule, they would fail to advance in subsequent grades. Later, the teacher began to understand that there were other linguistic dimensions to be analyzed and the students could write the way they liked, as long as they wrote. The spelling was to be learned afterwards, as part of the school development. The problem is that the school has not bothered to make students reflect upon their spelling difficulties. We are not relegating work with reading and text production to a secondary sphere, but we emphasize the importance of systematic teaching of spelling so that students master orthographic conventions, since they aren't able to do it only through contact with books and other printed materials or simply with the advancement in education. Thus, this research aims to promote reflection upon the teaching of spelling in a city-run school in Presidente Prudente, through the analysis of spelling errors produced by students in the 5th grade of elementary school. The research corpus is composed of textual productions of all classes of fifth grade in a public school, located in the city of Presidente Prudente/SP. In this investigation we will use the qualitative / quantitative approach, through which we will describe, categorize and indicate the frequency of misspellings present in writing productions, in light of the classification established by Morais (2009).