A ABORDAGEM DA ORTOGRAFIA NOS ANOS INICIAIS: uma proposta de análise de atividades em materiais didáticos

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relevance of orthography instruction in the early years of Elementary Education, particularly from the 2nd to the 4th grade, emphasizing its contribution to the development of writing skills and to the expansion of students’ communicative competence. The study is grounded in the understanding that communicative competence goes beyond the formal mastery of the written norm, encompassing the ability to use language appropriately, reflectively, and functionally across different social contexts, which presupposes the progressive appropriation of the orthographic system. The general objective of the research is to examine the activities and teaching strategies related to orthography present in didactic materials used in the early years of Elementary Education, with a focus on the arbitrary relationships between speech and writing. The specific objectives are: to identify recurrent orthographic deviations in written productions by students from the 2nd to the 4th grade of Elementary Education; to analyze these deviations in light of phoneme–grapheme relationships; and to examine the approach to orthography adopted in the didactic materials, establishing correlations between pedagogical proposals and the deviations observed. The study is theoretically grounded in Applied Linguistics and in the contributions of authors such as Ferreiro and Teberosky (1979), Nóbrega (2013), Soares (2023), and Cagliari (1989, 1998, 2005), while also engaging with the guidelines of the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC). Orthography is understood not as a set of rules to be memorized, but as a system that requires the understanding of its regularities and irregularities, articulated with practices of reading, writing, and linguistic analysis. Methodologically, the research is situated within a qualitative–interpretative paradigm, which conceives reality as a social construction. Action research is adopted as the methodological approach, enabling data collection through observation of the school context, pedagogical practices, and the analysis of students’ written productions. The analysis of graphic deviations reveals an active process of hypothesis formulation by students, highlighting the need for theoretically grounded teaching practices guided by intentional pedagogical interventions. Such deviations, expected in the initial stages of literacy, indicate advances in linguistic development. The appropriation of the orthographic system proves to be more effective when instruction moves beyond the memorization of rules and adopts reflective approaches, fostering meaningful learning, linguistic autonomy, and the development of communicative competence in its critical and functional dimensions.