Competência fonológica de alunos de português língua não materna que frequentam o ensino regular português

Abstract

Phonological competence, besides representing a fundamental component in language proficiency, is also a key area in the learning process of reading and writing. Therefor its development should be a priority for Portuguese second language (PL2) students. PL2 students’ phonological competence is the object of study of this work. Its main goal is to understand whether the phonological competence of those students differs from the phonological competence of Portuguese native speakers students. This paper also aims to identify the language areas deserving further attention in children’s educational process whose mother tongue is not Portuguese, so as to prevent possible school failure. Additionally, the objective was to identify whether factors such as the number of years to Portuguese language exposure, the number of years to Portuguese school attendance and parent’s education, are related to eventual differences between the two groups. This research is part of a wider one in which the syntactic and semantic skills of these groups are similarly being investigated. A sample of 38 children attending the 4th, 5th or 6th year of Portuguese regular education were distributed in two groups paired according to age, gender and class: one composed by 19 PL2 pupils and another by 19 Portuguese native pupils. Phonological competence was accessed using the following PALPA-P tests: the lexical hearing decision, imageability and frequency task and the rhyme judgment task. Although Portuguese native students have higher levels of phonological competence than non-native ones such differences do not appear to be related either to the number of years of Portuguese language exposure or the number of years to Portuguese school attendance, or even, parent’s education.

Date of Award	30 Jun 2015
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Mª Emília Santos (Supervisor) & Hanna Jakubowicz Batoréo (Co-Supervisor)