Loading...
Publication
SEMantic and PRAgmatic assessment platform for school-age children
| Name: | Description: | Size: | Format: | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.94 MB | Adobe PDF |
Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Background: Semantic and pragmatic skills are developed throughout life and are essential in the development of school and social learning. Upon entering school, learning to read and write is developed in two large areas of knowledge. The first implies capacities of recognition and decoding of written symbols of the word and vocabulary development and the second allows the understanding of what is read
through inferential capacities and non-literal interpretation. Often, students with reading comprehension difficulties go unnoticed. It is easier to detect a child who reads slowly, syllable by syllable, or with mistakes than those who read fluently but without understanding the content. These difficulties only become evident when questions are asked about the text and when it is necessary to understand the questions of subjects such as mathematics or science. Thus, success to reach the National Curricular Plan can be compromised.
Methods: Material was developed to evaluate semantic and pragmatic skills in school-aged children. In semantics, aspects of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations (lexical field, synonymy and antonyms) and paronymy are evaluated. In pragmatics, competences are evaluated such as inferences, comprehension of idioms and proverbs. This material will be placed on a platform that can be consulted and used by different
professionals working with children. The items that constitute this material took into account the stages of language development and school level. The lexicon used is in the domain of European Portuguese.
Results: The 756 children who were assessed attended public and private schools in Portugal. The results show an increasing evolution of the lexical competences of the children, with significant differences between
the different age groups in all tests. There were no significant differences between female and male except in the paronym test. Regarding the socio-professional level of the child's origin, it is verified that it is a differentiating factor of lexical competence because significant differences in all tests were observed regardless of the age of the child.
Conclusions: The authors concluded that it is of great importance to analyse lexical competence regarding the aspects of its organization, as it enables students to deal with academic tasks successfully, improving literacy as well as to be able to act in a systematic and productive way in the intervention with children with language disorders. The complexity and innovation of the pragmatic skills assessment (in European Portuguese) leads to this work to continue in development.
Description
Keywords
Semantic Pragmatics Assessment School age
Citation
Publisher
BMC