Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud (Sep 2010)
How the children from the indigenous comunity of Guambia read and write in spanish?
Abstract
The aim of this investigation was to establish the reading and writing performance and competencies of third grade children of an elementary school in the indigenous reservation of Guambia, in Cauca, Colombia. Materials and methods: This investigation was descriptive and quantitative, and also included a transverse analysis. The analysis included a total of 54 children enrolled in third grade. This was a representative sample of the total number of children included in the population. The results obtained showed evidence that most children expressed difficulties in obtaining information from the text to withdraw conclusions. On the other hand, they seemed to have an easier time reading the surface of the text away from a textual production level. They were able to enunciate and to develope the conflicting parts of the reading or text. They did have difficulty developing the end arguments. Also the majority of children were able to maintain the thematic axis of the readings. There was difficulty with thematic progression and with structuring new argument proposals. They presented gender agreement for number utterances in conversation. Finally, the study found that children are completing the construction of the hypothesis alphabetically, causing increased presence of errors in writing. The study concluded that children in these schools were found to be mostly in the literal level of comprehension and textual production, which is not in agreement to the grade level they are placed. Furthermore, in graphic expression specific type errors were omission, hypo or hypersegmentation and substitutions (except for/-o-u-y-uby-/o due to linguistic/dialectical interference).
