Cerebral Palsy: effects of writing on a child’s writing

Abstract

We attempted to grasp the effect of reading texts on a child’s writing. The child, henceforth S., cannot speak or write on her own due to cerebral palsy. The teacher reported S.’s difficulties with reading activities, thus a weekly activity involving one of Eva Furnari’s books was suggested by the speech therapist at the school-clinic class the child attended. The activity resulted in the child producing several texts. Film transcriptions where these texts were read were added to these productions, which integrated the corpus located in the NALingua-CNPq data bases. The data analysis was based on Borges (2006) who recommends a literacy process through the reading of different texts. The results point to a particular reading and writing acquisition process in which intersections between symbols/writing and writing/writing operate the child’s reading process. S.’s writing productions present effects of the matrix-texts read, in a set of mirrors which reveal the functioning of language, and at the same time differences denoting the singularity of a person. Objective and subjective changes due to the assumption of a divergent theoretical approach by the speech therapist in relation to the teacher’s approach resulted in objective and subjective changes of the child’s relationship to writing.