Orthographic Knowledge and the Ability to Produce Texts in Different Production Conditions

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between orthographic knowledge and writing texts, and analyze whether different production conditions affect the quality of narrative texts. Study participants were 72 students in the 5th year of Public Elementary Education. Data were collected by applying a dictation and by the writing of texts in three production situations: free theme, from a sequence of figures and retelling. The results showed that students have a poor knowledge of spelling, being the most frequent errors those involving contextual and morphosyntactic rules, besides the irregular cases. The more elaborated texts were those produced from the retelling condition. A moderate but statistically significant positive correlation was obtained between spelling correctly and writing more elaborated texts.