Abstract

LUCEN, Renata Nóbrega de  and  SPINILLO, Alina Galvão. Literacy and the development of metatextual awareness: epilinguistic and metalinguistic knowledge in focus. Arq. bras. psicol. [online]. 2018, vol.70, n.3, pp.51-65. ISSN 1809-5267.

This present study investigates the relationship between literacy and metatextual awareness. The study takes into account the fact that this type of awareness involves both epilinguistic and metalinguistic knowledge, so that seven-year-old literate and illiterate children were asked to solve tasks which evaluated these two types of knowledge in relation to narrative texts. Complete and incomplete stories were presented, and the children were asked to make judgments about their constituent parts, explaining the basis for their judgments. Both groups had similar performance in the epilinguístic task, but the illiterate children had difficulties in the metalinguistic task, while the literate children performed well in both tasks, especially in the metalinguistic one. Thus it was concluded that although there is an epilinguistic knowledge even among illiterate children, literacy contributes to the development of metatextual awareness as a whole.

Keywords : Children; Literacy; Metatextual awareness; Epilinguistic knowledge; Metalinguistic knowledge.

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