Eu ainda não falei, eu quero falar!: os sentidos de escrita atribuídos por crianças pré-escolares

Abstract

Supported by the contributions of the Historical-Cultural Theory (THC), the present study has the object of study written language in children's education and is designed to understand the meanings attributed to written language by children of public and private preschools in the municipality of Santarém-Pará. The study starts from the assumption that the child is a social being and from a young age is able to establish relations with the world of culture, to appropriate the meanings and to attribute meanings to it. In the same way, he understands that written language is a complex cultural instrument, essential in the process of humanization through which all human beings pass. However, the child's sense of writing will depend on how we conceive the written culture and how we present it to it. Considering the theoretical-methodological principles of the historical-cultural approach, which refer to the analysis of the process, focusing on the essence of the phenomenon, and not on its appearance, we developed a field investigation in two institutions of Early Childhood Education, one of public network and another of the private network of Santarém - Pará, from April to July 2017. 38 children aged between 5 and 6 years of the respective institutions participated as subjects of the research. As methodological procedures we perform: participant observation and individual and collective interviews through the techniques to complete stories, story and walk drawings. We adopted as log strategies the field diary, photographs and voice and video recording. The data produced in the observations allowed us to verify that the experiences offered to children in both institutions (public and private) still do not gather the understanding that this written language develops from practices that enrich the experiences with the culture and the possibilities of expression of the child by drawing, playing, and contact with objects of the written culture that involves this activity. The analysis of interview data showed, in the first instance, that the different meanings attributed to written language by preschool children do not match their social function of writing. These are certainly influenced by the way teachers have conceived and conducted the experiences and experiences with written language, as well as by the way they consider the specificities of children and their childhoods in this first stage of education. In a second moment, by approaching children from real situations of writing, we observed that they attributed meanings appropriate to their social function, indicating a more conscious relationship with the learning of this activity. Therefore, seeking to understand the meanings attributed to writing in the preschool, having the child as a capable subject in the research process, allowed to highlight the need for changes, through pedagogical practices, that can actually contribute to the insertion of the child in the world of written culture so that it perceives writing not as a synonym of letters and sounds but as a cultural instrument that allows communication, the recording of expression and human knowledge in its most elaborate form.