A ortografia em crianças francesas, inglesas e portuguesas

Abstract

The authors' purpose in this paper is to compare the spelling of the written performances of 180 children of the 4th school year (60 from London, 60 from Paris and 60 from Porto, belonging to whole classes in each country), obtained from two cartoons which the children were asked to describe individually. The first finding concerns the percentage of errors made. For an average of 94 words, the English pupils made 10% and the Franch pupils 10,5% of errors while, for an average of 77 words, the Portuguese pupils made 5,5% of errors. The different kinds of errors which were found may be subdivided into 4 categories: on the one hand gender and number errors (non-application or misapplication of the agreement rules) and usage errors (affecting the graphic form of the word without affecting its auditive form) and, on the other hand, phonetic errors (affecting the phonetism of the words) and linguistic errors (errors of verbal morphology and non-identification of words). The distribution of the errors translates the difficulties inherent in each language.