Representational Redescription in the acquisition of spelling ability
Veronica Marrocu, Enrico Savelli
Writing ability is a complex process, which generally involves a coordinated sequence of processing stages: the application of auditory/phonological analysis, knowledge and application of phoneme/grapheme conversion rules, the acquisition of specific spelling rules and the implementation of musculoskeletal action schemes. The acquisition and coordination of these skills requires a series of implicit processes that become progressively more explicit and conscious. Based on the Representational Redescription (RR) model proposed by Karmiloff-Smith (1992), we attempted to ascertain whether the RR process came into play in children’s learning of writing, highlighting how much and when implicit or explicit knowledge is involved during the learning of this skill and how long the evolving of its automatisation coincides with a relaxation of the hypothetical stiffness of the system in the initial stages, and therefore the progressive ability to voluntarily manipulate processes. In our work, a dictated test was administered to 262 children attending primary years 2, 3, 4 and 5, asking them to voluntarily make mistakes. We then made cognitive-linguistic analysis of the voluntary and spontaneous errors of each child and a comparison between the performances of the various school years in order to see the trend of cognitive flexibility and its relationship with the automatisation of processes. The results show that RR processes actually exist also in the acquisition and evolution of writing skills, with the detection of different representational levels depending on the age group. We therefore discovered that with age, the system relaxes and representations regarding the orthographic processes disengage from the constraints observed in the early stages of learning.
Keywords
Spelling, Representational Redescription, development of writing, learning.