A variable study of the rotic in school writing

Abstract

The written language has great sociocultural relevance, since most of the spheres of human activity are organized through its use. Considering this importance and the need to write in accordance with orthographic conventions, this work aims to investigate the writing of the rhotic in a syllabic coda position (medial and final), in the writing of elementary school students from a private school, in the city of São Lourenço da Mata – PE. Here, we aim to analyze the erasure of the rhotic in syllabic coda, in orthographic writing, arising from orality and, therefore, we check the possible triggers for the process in question. We take as theoretical assumptions the works of Bisol (2009), Cagliari (2002), Callou, Moraes and Leite (1998), Cardoso et al. (2014), Costa (2009), Faraco (2006), Garcia (2010), Miranda (2010), Mollica (2003), Signorini (2001), Tasca (2002) and Vegini (2007). The corpus of this research consisted of orthographic dictations, based on the inductive method and consecutive quantitative analysis of these data. Thus, it was possible to appropriate material that allows us to conjecture about the heterogeneity of writing, as we identified that the students’ orthographic “errors” are, in the majority, due to the fact that there is leakage of processes from the phonological field to the writing field. The results show that the erasure decreases with the increase in schooling, because, among the 440 words analyzed, erasure occurred 98 times in the 6th grade and 35 in the 9th grade. It is also worth noting that both classes varied more the words in which the rhotic was in a medial coda position.