Manuscritos escolares de alunos recém-alfabetizados: um estudo sorbre a densidade e diversidade lexical

Abstract

In the last decades, different approaches have been proposed to understand the vocabulary knowledge and to develop metrics for its analysis at scholar environments. An index used to measure this knowledge is the lexical richness, represented with linguistic components, e.g. lexical diversity and lexical density. This study analyzed the lexical richness in scholar manuscripts produced by newly literate Brazilian dyads, considering the number of Written Words (PE), Lexical Density (DeL), Lexical Diversity (DiL) as categories. Therefore. We selected 30 etiological stories written by 5 newly literate Brazilian dyads, gathered during the development of a didactic project named “Contos do como e do porquê” in the year of 2012 on a private school at Maceió. Focusing on an exploratory study, we adopted a textual lexico-statistical methodological approach to quantify and analyze the categories PE, DeL and DiL. Thus, to measure the number of written words, we used the lexical analysis software Lexicanylitcs. The DiL category was measured using the D value, applied to the VOCD model. To measure the DeL category, we divided the number of lexical items (subjects, adjectives, verbs and modal adverbs) by the total number of words. Then, the obtained values were submitted to a descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. Our results indicate that the dyads wrote their productions with an average of 90 words, scoring a DeL of 48% and a DiL of 49.40%. We did not find correlation between the three categories, suggesting that they are independents and deserve individual evaluation. Furthermore, we did not find relevant variation over the values obtained by the three categories, in other words, the students scored similar PE, DeL and DiL. In summary, the results suggest that the collaborative writing may aid in the student’s lexical choices, supporting a textual production with diversified vocabulary and information density.