The Development of Sociolinguistic Awareness at Schools in Brazilian Portuguese and Reading Success

EasyChair Preprint no. 6077

Abstract

National and international assessments show that Brazil fails in the teaching of reading in its entire school system. This paper argues that the explanation for part of the students’ success in early learning of reading might be related to the development of sociolinguistic awareness. The rates of variation in eight phonological variables (-ow monophthongization, -aj, -ej monophthongization, diphthongization, coda -r deletion in nouns and in verbs, -d deletion in -ndo, cluster simplification, and vocalization of palatal lateral) in three different stylistic contexts (from less to more monitored speech: short interview - naming picture task - reading aloud task) collected in a 3rd grade classroom show a gradual relation between the increase in stylistic monitoring and the use of standard variant and a positive effect in the performance in a reading comprehension test. These results reveal that the development of sociolinguistic awareness can be measured by transposing the variant into spontaneous speech for reading aloud, suggesting automaticity in the decoding process by lexical route.

Keyphrases: Acquisition of sociolinguistic variation, phonological variation, reading, Reading assessment, Sociolinguistic awareness

@Booklet{EasyChair:6077,
  author = {Raquel Meister Ko Freitag},
  title = {The Development of Sociolinguistic Awareness at Schools in Brazilian Portuguese and Reading Success},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6077},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}