Unconventional spellings of falling diphthongs in texts of Elementary School

• Grant number: 13/11344-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2013
• End date: July 31, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Luciani Ester Tenani
• Grantee: Vanessa Padulla Gomes
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas (IBILCE). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de São José do Rio Preto. São José do Rio Preto , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project deals with unconventional spellings of falling diphthongs found in texts of students from sixth grade (fifth grade at the time of collection) of elementary school at a state public school. These texts come from Database of Written Texts of Elementary Education II (UNESP / SJRP). The main objective is to investigate what characteristics of diphthongs that are observed in spoken are motivating unconventional spellings that are identified in written texts. We hypothesized that the motivations for the occurrence of unconventional spellings are related to what students hypothesize about the relationship between speech of diphthongs and their spelling conventions. To deal with this relationship between speech and written done by students, we adopt the concept of written proposed by Correa (2004), which assumes that this relationship is constituted by movements done by students into oral/literate and spoken/written social practices. Analysis of the data will be done using quantitative and qualitative tools.