Educational Contexts and Written Language Acquisition

This thematic line has Margarida Alves Martins as its Principal Investigator, and includes as researchers Ana Cristina Silva, João Rosa, Liliana Salvador, Miguel Mata Pereira, Sérgio Gaitas and Tiago Almeida. It also includes several collaborators: Ana Isabel Santos, Jorge Gonçalves, Edlia Simões, Mónica Gaiolas (ex-PhD students), Leonor Moreira Rato (ex-Master student) and Sandra Figueiredo (ex FCT postdoctoral fellowship). Three doctoral students, Ana Albuquerque (FCT scholarships), Anabela Marcelo and Betina Astride are developing their projects in this line.

In this line, we aim to:

Analyse the literacy practices developed in kindergartens and their impact on the emergence of written language;
Develop naturalistic intervention studies to enhance children’s metalinguistic awareness and study their impact on children’s reading and writing outcomes in primary school;
Validate metalinguistic awareness assessment and intervention tools;
Study written language acquisition throughout primary education and conduct naturalistic intervention studies to promote the acquisition of writing and reading skills by all students, namely those at risk of failure and those with special educational needs;
Create teacher training materials;
Analyse teachers’ knowledge, attitudes and behaviours with regard to multilingualism and study the effectiveness of teaching strategies used by preschool and primary school teachers to promote the acquisition of Portuguese by second language learners, in multilingual classrooms;
Create a Corpus of Word Frequency, based on the analysis of words entered in children’s storybooks and on books that are specifically used to teach reading and writing in primary schools and display it online for open access by researchers and teachers.