PURPOSE: to analyze the performance of the metalinguistic skills and reading tests in students from 2nd to 5th grades of elementary education, according to psycholinguistic and cognitive-linguistic criteria and to check similarities and differences between the analyses. METHODS: 120 students from 2nd to 5th grades of a municipal school, of both genders, in the age ranging from 7 to 12 year old, divided into 4 groups for each grade. The students were submitted to tests of metalinguistic skills and reading. RESULTS: there were statistically significant differences among the groups in the metalinguistic skills, in the decoding of real words and non-words, for each variable, with exception for the 'Refusal' mistake type, with superior average for the types related to unsuccessful sound attempts and failure in the use of orthography, indicating that these types of mistakes were of larger occurrence. In the non-words reading there were statistically significant differences in unsuccessful sound attempts indicating that the students had lower performance in the decoding of words that demanded the use of phonological information. CONCLUSION: the adoption of the psycholinguistic and cognitive-linguistic criteria in evaluating real words and non-words' reading, along with the evaluation of the metalinguistic skills provide subsidies to the understanding of the way the students were processing the complex writing system of Brazilian Portuguese, besides to giving the necessary support to the comprehension of the specific difficulties showed by the students, guiding the speech and language professional in relation to the direct purposes in their work.
Reading; Evaluation; Learning; Linguistics; Education
