BACKGROUND: assessment of oral reading. AIM: to characterize, according to the variables of public or private school and literacy, the types of errors in word reading presented by typical elementary/middle school students considered competent readers by their teachers. METHOD: participants of this study were 151 students with ages ranging between 8 and 12 years, from the 4th to the 7th grade of public and private schools. The students read a list of 38 words. The oral readings were transcribed and the errors analyzed according to their frequency. The frequency of errors was calculated based on the possibilities of errors presented by the used word list. RESULTS: the obtained results gave evidence to the errors presented by typical students of both public and private schools from all of the tested grades. There was a statistically significant progressive reduction in errors of orthographic decoding according to literacy (p<0.0001). Considering the groups, students from private schools presented fewer errors of global orthographic decoding when compared to students from public schools (p < 0.0001). CONCLUSION: the results suggest that reading errors are part of the learning process of orthographic decoding rules. These errors are progressively overcome with literacy. The domain of orthographic decoding independent of the context occurred more prematurely than that which is dependent of the grapheme context.
Reading; Assessment; Speech-Language and Hearing Sciencies
