O objetivo desta pesquisa consiste em investigar como os professores de educação infantil compreendem as orientações teóricas e metodológicas fornecidas pela produção bibliográfica voltada para esse nível de ensino sobre os processos de alfabetização e letramento. A dificuldade encontrada pelos professores de educação infantil em justificar teórica e metodologicamente as práticas pedagógicas relacionadas a tais processos, apesar do crescimento da produção bibliográfica sobre a questão, constitui-se no problema desta pesquisa. Esta foi motivada pela necessidade de orientar a elaboração de planejamentos, acompanhar e avaliar o trabalho das alunas-estagiárias do Curso de Pedagogia em instituições de educação infantil e pela inclusão na literatura educacional do conceito de letramento. O recorte temporal final da década de 1970 até 2005 foi estipulado, levando-se em consideração as discussões realizadas nas duas áreas envolvidas. Para a educação infantil, esse período foi marcado por lutas em prol de um atendimento de caráter educativo. Na área da alfabetização e do letramento, buscou-se nesse período explicações para o fracasso de nossas escolas em alfabetizar (ensinar as habilidades necessárias para ler e escrever) e letrar (ensinar a fazer uso competente da leitura e da escrita em diversas práticas sociais). As discussões em ambas as áreas ocorreram simultaneamente e fizeram parte do processo de democratização da educação brasileira. Perseguimos, ao longo desta investigação, o pressuposto segundo o qual há correspondência entre a função conferida à educação infantil e os conceitos de alfabetização e letramento. A relação existente entre essas temáticas ocorre em razão do contexto histórico em que são produzidas. Subsidiados pelos pressupostos da teoria histórico-cultural, entendemos a educação como condição universal do desenvolvimento humano; a escola como instituição responsável por possibilitar a apropriação pelos alunos dos bens culturais produzidos pela humanidade; o professor como responsável pela organização do ensino e pela promoção da aprendizagem e desenvolvimento dos alunos; e a mediação pedagógica dotada de sistematicidade e intencionalidade como condição maior do trabalho docente. Para a consecução desta pesquisa, refletimos sobre os seguintes aspectos: as funções atribuídas à educação infantil brasileira nas últimas três décadas, tomando como referência a legislação educacional brasileira; os conceitos de alfabetização e letramento; a produção bibliográfica voltada para a educação infantil que discute tais conceitos. Tais reflexões fundamentaram a análise das funções conferidas à educação infantil por 14 professoras que atuam em três centros municipais de educação infantil, suas concepções de alfabetização e letramento e sua prática pedagógica. Concluímos ser papel da educação infantil enriquecer o letramento das crianças e estimular sua alfabetização, de acordo com as possibilidades e os limites desse nível de escolaridade. Isso requer reconhecer que tais processos são indissociáveis e interdependentes, porém distintos e que esta é uma condição para sistematizar a prática pedagógica e provê-la de intencionalidade. Essa conclusão nos transportou para a necessidade de reorganizar a formação de professores, viabilizando a apropriação do conteúdo envolvido nesta investigação pelos atuais e pelos futuros professores de educação infantil. / Current research investigates the manner childrens education teachers understand the theoretical and methodological guidelines given in specialized bibliography on readingwriting and literacy processes at this level. Current research deals with the difficulties that childrens education teachers find to justify theoretically and methodologically the pedagogical practices related to such processes in spite of increasing bibliographical production on these issues. Investigation has been motivated by the need to supervise planning, follow up and evaluate the assignments of students-trainees of the Pedagogy Course in children education institutions and by the inclusion of educational literature on the concept of literacy. Taking into consideration discussions in the two fields involved, a time period, namely, the late 1970s up to 2005, was pinpointed. In the case of childrens education, the above mentioned period is highlighted by struggles for educational attendance. During this period, explanations for the failure of Brazilian schools in reading-writing (teaching necessary skills to read and write) and literacy (teaching competent usage of reading and writing within several social practices) were debated. Discussions on the two fields were simultaneous and became part and parcel of the democratization process of Brazilian education. Throughout the investigation a link between the role of childrens education and the reading-writing and literacy concepts has been foregrounded. In fact, the relationship between these themes is based on the historical context in which they are produced. According to the historical and cultural theory adopted, education is a universal condition of human development; the school is an institution accountable for making possible the students appropriation of cultural factors produced by mankind; the teacher is the person responsible for the teaching organization, for the promotion of the students development and learning; pedagogical mediation pervaded by systematization and intentionality as a major condition for teaching. The following aspects were discussed to deepen research: the functions attributed to childrens education in Brazil during the last three decades with Brazilian education legislation as reference; the readingwriting and literacy concepts; the bibliographical production in childrens education that discusses these very concepts. Above discussions foregrounded the analysis of functions given to childrens education by fourteen teachers who worked in three municipal centers for children education, their ideas on reading-writing and literacy and their pedagogical practice. The role of childrens education is the enrichment of childrens reading-writing and the stimulation of literacy according to their possibilities and limits at their own level. It should be acknowledged that these processes are linked and interdependent, albeit distinct. It is, indeed, a condition to systematize pedagogical practice and provide it with intentionality. Results indicate the need for the reorganization of teachers training so that contents involved in present investigation by current and future childrens education teachers may be workable.

In a small, mixed method study, fifteen second grade students in one classroom in a low socioeconomic school were recruited to study their motivation in reading and writing and to see if their motivation improved with a collaborative reading-writing project. These fifteen children were given a pre-survey on their motivation to read and write to determine how they felt before the collaborative reading-writing project was started. As students completed their portion of the project, they were given the same survey questions as a post-evaluative tool. The researcher also interviewed students to get a more in-depth understanding on their feelings about reading and writing as well as their feelings about the collaborative project. Analysis of observations, pre- and post-surveys and interviews showed that the biggest motivation was the social interaction among students. The researcher hopes that through this analysis administrators can make positive changes in our schools and language arts curriculums.

Alfabetizar e letrar pessoas jovens e adultas constitui uma necessidade e, no caso de indivíduos adultos com deficiência mental, os estudos a respeito de letramento são rarefeitos e demandam, por isso, mais pesquisas e ações políticas que possam modificar as condições desses indivíduos. Letramento significa compreender e elaborar a linguagem e fazer uso social dela em várias situações da vida prática. Nesta pesquisa, objetivou-se comparar o grau de letramento, o nível de compreensão de leitura e produção escrita de adultos deficientes mentais, considerados alfabetizados, antes e depois de um programa de práticas de letramento. Estudou-se, também, a influência da família no nível de compreensão de leitura e escrita dos sujeitos. Participaram da pesquisa 11 sujeitos classificados, por meio de avaliação psicológica, como deficientes mentais moderados ou severos, com idade entre 18 e 34 que eram considerados alfabetizados e tinham freqüentado programa de educação especial por 5 anos ou mais. Foram aplicados questionários aos responsáveis pelos alunos para verificar as suas condições de letramento das famílias. A partir da avaliação inicial, elaborou-se um programa de práticas de letramento, realizado duas vezes por semana, durante 8 meses para que os sujeitos ampliassem o uso social da leitura e escrita. A cada sessão era feito um registro em diário de campo e realizadas algumas filmagens esporádicas para posterior análise. Os resultados mostraram que, apesar de serem considerados alfabetizados, os sujeitos dessa pesquisa tinham pouco domínio do uso social da leitura e escrita e que o grau de letramento das famílias influenciavam o acesso à leitura e escrita e, conseqüentemente, o seu uso social. Ao final das análises, pode se afirmar que, por meio da mediação pedagógica, houve o desenvolvimento de uma postura mais reflexiva sobre a leitura e a escrita e a pesquisa contribuiu para algumas mudanças na realidade dos sujeitos nela inseridos. Pode-se afirmar que a educação formal, por meio da mediação, contribui para a formação social da mente. / Literacy and learning to read and write are a need for young people and adults. Studies on the theme with mentally deficient adults are scarce and require more research and policies that may modify these subjects. Learning to read and write means the understanding and the molding of the language, using it socially in several and different situations of daily life. Current research compares the reading-writing degree, reading comprehension level and writing production by mentally deficient literate adults, prior to and after a battery of reading-writing practices. The family\'s influence on the reading and writing comprehension level of the subjects has also been analyzed. Eleven subjects, with moderate or severe mental deficiency, aged between 18 and 34 years old, participated in the research. They had already taken part in special education programs for five years or over. Questionnaires, handed out to people who were responsible for the above-mentioned subjects, verified their families\' reading-writing conditions. A program with reading-writing practices was then prepared from this initial evaluation. The program was put into practice twice a week for 8 months so that the subjects could broaden the social usage of writing and reading. A report was made for each session and sporadic filming was undertaken for further investigation. Results showed that, in spite of the fact that they were literate, the subjects of research had only slight dominion of the social usage of writing and reading. Moreover, the families\' reading-writing degree affected their access to reading and writing, and thus, the social use of language. Analyses revealed that a more reflexive stance on reading and writing could be developed through pedagogical intervention. Actually the research has contributed towards certain change in the daily life of the subjects. Formal education actually contributes for the mind\'s social training through pedagogical mediation.

Do Projeto Escrileituras: um modo de ler-escrever em meio à vida / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, um traçado de possibilidades para pensar a Educação. O meio é composto por linhas que atravessam uma pedagogia da tradução entre Bio-Oficinas de Filosofia. Trata-se de dizer da travessia, do possível de uma escritura ou, ainda, da potência transcriadora presente nas formas textuais que fazem ler-escrever a vida imanente. Uma pedagogia dos pormenores. Um processo de rachadura dos signos reducionistas durante a vazão de seus componentes vibráteis. Implica, portanto, a extração de visibilidades e de audíveis materializados em livros, quadros, esculturas, poesia, desenhos, fórmulas, arranjos e outras assinaturas. Estes, entendidos como territórios efetuados na tradução de rastros humanos e não humanos. Nesse sentido, também, uma Bio-Oficina de Filosofia é pensada como espaço de invenção das marcas que contam histórias do e no mundo: pistas que servem para novas conexões e sobrevoos de textos vividos e não vividos, aos quais importam a criação de ressonâncias intensivas, os desassossegos, as raspagens conceituais e algum desejo de retorno ao caos como plano do pensamento. / From the Project Escrileituras: a way to read-write in life / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, an outline of possibilities in thinking about Education. The in-between is made of lines that draw a pedagogy of translation through Bio-Workshop of Philosophy. It is about the crossing, the possibility of writing or, even, the creational power that is present in textual forms that enable read-write the immanent life. A pedagogy of the details. A process of cracking reductionist signs during the outflow of its vibrating components. Thus, it implies the extraction of the visible and the audible materialized in books, paints, sculptures, poetry, drawings, formulas, arrangements and other signatures. Hence, these are understood as territories accomplished in the translation of human and non-human traces. In this sense, a Bio-Workshop of Philosophy is thought out as a space for reinvention of the marks that tell stories of, and in, the world: clues that are used for new connections and transcendence of texts experienced and not experienced, which are concerned with the creation of intensive resonances, the uneasiness, the conceptual cleaning, and some desire to return to the chaos as the plateau for thinking.

Research in the area of academic writing has demonstrated that writing varies significantly across disciplines and among genres within disciplines. Two important approaches to studying diversity in disciplinary academic writing have been the genre-based approach and the corpus-based approach. Genre studies have considered the situatedness of writing tasks, including the larger sociocultural context of the discourse community (e.g., Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Bhatia, 2004) as well as the move structure in specific genres like the research article (e.g., Swales, 1990, 2004). Corpus- based studies of disciplinary writing have focused more closely on the linguistic variation across registers, with the re-search article being the most widely studied register (e.g., Cortes, 2004; Gray, 2011). Studies of under-graduate writing in the disciplines have tended to focus on task classification (e.g., Braine, 1989; Horowitz, 1986a), literacy demands (e.g.,Carson, Chase, Gibson, & Hargrove, 1992), or student development (e.g., Carroll, 2002; Leki, 2007). The purpose of the present study is to build on these previous lines of research to explore undergraduate disciplinary writing from multiple perspectives in order to better prepare English language learners for the writing tasks they might encounter in their majors at a US university. Specifically, this exploratory study examines two disciplines: psychology and chemistry. Through writing task classification (following Horowitz, 1986), qualitative interviews with faculty and students in each discipline, and a corpus-based text analysis of course readings and upper-division student writing, the study yielded several important findings. With regard to writing tasks, psychology writing tasks showed more variety than chemistry. In addition, lower division classes had fewer writing assignments than upper division courses, particularly in psychology. The findings also showed a mismatch between the expectations of instructors in each discipline and students’ understanding of such writing expectations. The linguistic analysis of course readings and student writing demonstrated differences in language use both between registers and across disciplines.

El propósito de esta investigación cualitativa es indagar, a través de un estudio descriptivo-interpretativo, la eventual incidencia de un Programa de Alfabetización Familiar en la inclusión de los niños en la cultura escrita al ingresar al primer año escolar. Para esto se evaluarán ciertas actitudes vinculadas con el tipo de contacto que establecen los hijos de algunos participantes con la cultura de los libros y los conocimientos construidos acerca del sistema de escritura y del lenguaje escrito, como así también el desarrollo de estrategias lectoras. Se parte del análisis del Programa de Alfabetización con la Familia “Cuenta Quien Cuenta”, iniciado en el año 2006 en Paysandú, Uruguay, destinado a padres, madres y otros referentes familiares de niños hasta 5 años de edad, pertenecientes a contextos de alta vulnerabilidad económica, social y cultural. El programa tiene una duración de cuatro meses, en los se desarrollan doce talleres. En estos espacios se leen cuentos, se comparten pistas sobre cómo promover la lectura frecuente y la conversación sobre libros y cuentos en el hogar, se compaginan libros y, sobre todo, se insiste en la revalorización del rol de los asistentes como primeros agentes alfabetizadores de sus hijos. Al finalizar el período de intervención, cada hogar cuenta con alrededor de dieciséis libros de cuentos como material de lectura. El relevamiento realizado sobre otros programas y experiencias de este tipo puso de manifiesto que, en general, están centrados en la descripción del seguimiento realizado y en la socialización de registros anecdóticos, no incluyendo publicaciones que den cuenta de la evaluación de sus efectos en cuanto a los conocimientos de los niños. Por esa razón, esta investigación procura aportar un conjunto de herramientas que permitan iniciar un camino tendiente a focalizar indicadores que permitan evaluar más específicamente los alcances de las acciones realizadas. / The purpose of this qualitative research is to investigate, by means of a descriptive-interpretive approach, the potential impact of a Family Literacy Program on the inclusion of children in the written culture when they enter the first grade of primary school. This Family Literacy Program assesses the knowledge built up by some participants’ children upon the writing system, as well as about their possibilities for storytelling and the form of contact they have established with books. It starts from the analysis of the program "Cuenta Quien Cuenta” (It Matters Who Tells the Story), launched in 2006 in Paysandú, Uruguay, which is directed to parents and other family members that act as significant role models for children under 5 years old living under highly vulnerable economic, social and cultural conditions. This program is compounded by twelve workshops where stories are read, clues about how to promote discussions on books and stories at home are given, and books are elaborated. These workshops emphasized on the revalorization of the role of the participants as primary agents the children’s literacy. At the end of the intervention period, each household has twelve story books as reading materials. This research attempts to appoint a systemic observation on children’s initial literacy, considering that participation in social practices of reading and writing is the inescapable way to forming readers and writers who could have access through these practices to the necessary metalinguistic reflecting levels. In the survey conducted on other programs and experiences of this type, generally they focus on the description of the monitoring and socialization of anecdotal records, not finding publications that account for the evaluation of their effects in terms of knowledge of the children. For that reason, this research seeks to provide a set of tools to start a path tending to focus indicators to assess more specifically the scope of the actions taken.

This thesis investigates the reading and writing of two patients with brain injuries due to cerebro-vascular accidents. Background tests show both patients to be moderately anomic and to have severe impairments in reading and writing nonwords. Investigations of the locus of impairment in AN's nonword reading showed her to have normal orthographic analysis capabilities but impairments in converting single and multiple graphemes into phonemes and in phonemic blending. The central issue studied was the role of lexical but non-semantic processes in reading aloud, writing to dictation and copying. For this purpose a "familiar nonword" paradigm was developed in which the patients learned to read or write a small set of nonwords either with or without any associated semantics. Both AN and AM were able to learn to read nonwords to which no meanings were attached but they could still not read novel nonwords. Both patients were unable to report any meanings for the familiar nonwords when they read them and there was no evidence that learning to read them improved their sub-lexical processing abilities. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route from print to sound that is dedicated to processing whole familiar words. It was also shown with AN that if nonwords are given meanings then learning is faster than if they are not given meanings. Experiments designed to test the hypothesis that nonwords are read by analogy to words found no support for it. Both patients have severe impairments in writing novel nonwords to dictation. As they can repeat spoken nonwords after they have failed to write them, this is not due to a short-term memory impairment. Despite their nonword writing impairments, both patients were able to write to dictation the meaningless nonwords that they had previously learned to read at the first attempt, and AN did so one month after learning to read them. Neither patient however, could write novel nonwords made by reordering the letters of the familiar nonwords. Furthermore, the familiar nonwords used spellings that are of a priori low probability. The familiar nonwords must therefore have been written using lexical knowledge. Tests of semantic association showed that the familiar nonwords evoked no semantic information that the patients could report. Function words dictated to AN evoked little semantic information but she wrote them to dictation significantly better than nonwords made by reordering their letters. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route for writing to dictation. Copying was studied both with and without a five second delay between presentation and response. AN was better at delayed copying of meaningless but familiar nonwords than she was at copying novel nonwords. She was also better at delayed copying of six-letter, bi-syllabic nonwords that she had been trained to copy than she was at copying novel nonwords made by recombining the first and second halves of the familiar nonwords such that these halves retained their positions from the parent nonwords. AN was better at copying function words than nonwords made by reordering their letters. She was also better at copying function words than she was at reading or writing them to dictation. These results are evidence for a direct lexical route for copying. AN and AM were both able to write to dictation nonwords that they had never heard or written before but with which they had been made visually familiar during a visual discrimination task. They must have used lexical knowledge to do so because the spellings used were of a priori very low probability. The creation of lexical orthographic information which can be retrieved from novel auditory input raises difficulties for current models and various possible interpretations are discussed. Finally, some of the possible implications of the re-learning abilities shown by these patients, for rehabilitation procedures are discussed briefly.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on August 27, 2009). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Ulla Connor, Aye Nu E. Duerksen, Honnor Orlando. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70).

Do Projeto Escrileituras: um modo de ler-escrever em meio à vida / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, um traçado de possibilidades para pensar a Educação. O meio é composto por linhas que atravessam uma pedagogia da tradução entre Bio-Oficinas de Filosofia. Trata-se de dizer da travessia, do possível de uma escritura ou, ainda, da potência transcriadora presente nas formas textuais que fazem ler-escrever a vida imanente. Uma pedagogia dos pormenores. Um processo de rachadura dos signos reducionistas durante a vazão de seus componentes vibráteis. Implica, portanto, a extração de visibilidades e de audíveis materializados em livros, quadros, esculturas, poesia, desenhos, fórmulas, arranjos e outras assinaturas. Estes, entendidos como territórios efetuados na tradução de rastros humanos e não humanos. Nesse sentido, também, uma Bio-Oficina de Filosofia é pensada como espaço de invenção das marcas que contam histórias do e no mundo: pistas que servem para novas conexões e sobrevoos de textos vividos e não vividos, aos quais importam a criação de ressonâncias intensivas, os desassossegos, as raspagens conceituais e algum desejo de retorno ao caos como plano do pensamento. / From the Project Escrileituras: a way to read-write in life / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, an outline of possibilities in thinking about Education. The in-between is made of lines that draw a pedagogy of translation through Bio-Workshop of Philosophy. It is about the crossing, the possibility of writing or, even, the creational power that is present in textual forms that enable read-write the immanent life. A pedagogy of the details. A process of cracking reductionist signs during the outflow of its vibrating components. Thus, it implies the extraction of the visible and the audible materialized in books, paints, sculptures, poetry, drawings, formulas, arrangements and other signatures. Hence, these are understood as territories accomplished in the translation of human and non-human traces. In this sense, a Bio-Workshop of Philosophy is thought out as a space for reinvention of the marks that tell stories of, and in, the world: clues that are used for new connections and transcendence of texts experienced and not experienced, which are concerned with the creation of intensive resonances, the uneasiness, the conceptual cleaning, and some desire to return to the chaos as the plateau for thinking.

Do Projeto Escrileituras: um modo de ler-escrever em meio à vida / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, um traçado de possibilidades para pensar a Educação. O meio é composto por linhas que atravessam uma pedagogia da tradução entre Bio-Oficinas de Filosofia. Trata-se de dizer da travessia, do possível de uma escritura ou, ainda, da potência transcriadora presente nas formas textuais que fazem ler-escrever a vida imanente. Uma pedagogia dos pormenores. Um processo de rachadura dos signos reducionistas durante a vazão de seus componentes vibráteis. Implica, portanto, a extração de visibilidades e de audíveis materializados em livros, quadros, esculturas, poesia, desenhos, fórmulas, arranjos e outras assinaturas. Estes, entendidos como territórios efetuados na tradução de rastros humanos e não humanos. Nesse sentido, também, uma Bio-Oficina de Filosofia é pensada como espaço de invenção das marcas que contam histórias do e no mundo: pistas que servem para novas conexões e sobrevoos de textos vividos e não vividos, aos quais importam a criação de ressonâncias intensivas, os desassossegos, as raspagens conceituais e algum desejo de retorno ao caos como plano do pensamento. / From the Project Escrileituras: a way to read-write in life / OBEDUC / CAPES / INEP / UFRGS, an outline of possibilities in thinking about Education. The in-between is made of lines that draw a pedagogy of translation through Bio-Workshop of Philosophy. It is about the crossing, the possibility of writing or, even, the creational power that is present in textual forms that enable read-write the immanent life. A pedagogy of the details. A process of cracking reductionist signs during the outflow of its vibrating components. Thus, it implies the extraction of the visible and the audible materialized in books, paints, sculptures, poetry, drawings, formulas, arrangements and other signatures. Hence, these are understood as territories accomplished in the translation of human and non-human traces. In this sense, a Bio-Workshop of Philosophy is thought out as a space for reinvention of the marks that tell stories of, and in, the world: clues that are used for new connections and transcendence of texts experienced and not experienced, which are concerned with the creation of intensive resonances, the uneasiness, the conceptual cleaning, and some desire to return to the chaos as the plateau for thinking.