Linguistic variations in the use of written language by elementary school children from different socio-cultural backgrounds in Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina (original) (raw)

Poster presentation. JURE 2012 – A Learning Odyssey: Exploring new Horizons in Learning and Instruction. University of Regensburg, Germany, 2012 In most schools, teaching-learning processes are based on linguistic exchanges, mostly privileging certain oral and written forms used mainly by urban middle/high socio-economical groups. This situation indicates that socio-regional linguistic variation is mostly ignored in schooling, contributing to deepen educational exclusion processes. Improving school language learning, and school writing outcomes in general, requires a deeper knowledge of the children’s language forms and communication styles. The aim of this exploratory study is to describe the written language used by elementary school students with different socio-educational characteristics when composing a text about a familiar topic. Participants were 63 children attending third and seventh grade of basic education in four schools of Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina, chosen on the basis of socio-cultural heterogeneity and educational modality. Students were asked to write an individual text describing their neighborhood. These texts were digitally transcribed and divided into words. We performed a category analysis focused on six dimensions: word class, word syntactic role, word thematic role, word adjustment to orthographic conventions, semantic features of nouns, semantic features of verbs. We applied an Ascendant Hierarchical Cluster Analysis, in order to classify the 63 texts according to their similarity across these six dimensions, and to identify associations with students’ grade/school. Five clusters of texts/students were identified, revealing patterns organized primarily by word class choices, and by particular thematic and syntactic structures. Some semantic features of nouns and verbs have also shown to be traits of differentiation. These categories allow to identify the perspectives assumed by the students and their linguistic strategies when writing a simple text on a familiar topic. The clusters also show the breach in the mastery of the alphabetic code between third and seventh grade. Enhancing teachers` awareness of this diversity may contribute to more finely tuned instructional assessments and interventions.