PURPOSE: To investigate and compare the school literacy performance of 1st and 2nd grades elementary school individuals of a public school, before and after Reflexive Practices in Language Programs (RPLP). METHODS: Ninety-seven students of the 1st grade and 149 of the 2nd grade, between the years 2006 and 2008, took part in this study. The subjects were submitted to school literacy screenings before and after the RPLP. The programs had an average duration of four months, and were carried out in a collective situation in classrooms, and in partnership with the teachers of the selected classes. They were prepared according to the guiding themes: promotion of literacy practices; awareness about use of voice and noise levels at school; promotion of oral and written narratives, involving meta-language and, mainly, phonological awareness and the promotion of reading practices and reading comprehension. At the end of each program, final screenings were carried out in order to analyze and compare students' performance before and after their implementation. Data were qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed. RESULTS: Significant performance differences were found between 1st and 2nd grades, in both initial and final screenings, in the subtests dictation, words and sentences reading and sentence cloze were found. CONCLUSION: Second grade had better results than first grade. The results were more significant in subtests that required deeper understanding of the phoneme-grapheme association and vice-versa, suggesting that school literacy is necessary when social literacy is not present.
Education; Educational measurement; Reading; Handwriting; Learning
