Children’s writing acquisition stages: a new reading of an old theme

Abstract

This paper reviews the acquisition stages of writing based on the principles of Applied Linguistics, and offers an alternative to the well-known Ferreira’s stages, which are largely used by literacy teachers. In order to reach that goal, I use the findings and conclusions provided by studies on writing acquisition, from a phonological basis (ABAURRE, 1998, 1999; CAGLIARI, 1992a, 1992b, 1998), as well as the fundingis of studies on language acquisition that focus on the role of the syllabic mode in the acquisition process (MC NEILAGE; DAVIS, 1990). The corpus is composed of notes from field and experimental research carried out in public schools in Salvador, in five individual meetings of writing production. These writings allow me to conclude that the writing acquisition path starts with the absence of a graphic-phonic relation, goes through a series of cyclic stages of relations between sound/letter, until these stages reach orthographic relations, whose sound/graphic dependence is overcome.