Il dettato nella scuola primaria. Analisi di una pratica di insegnamento.

The study, which examines the practice of dictation in the first classes of primary schools, is divided into two parts. The first, which is purely historical, investigates the presence of dictation, as an educational practice, in ministerial programmes and scholastic journals from the Unification of Italy through to the present day. The second presents an empirical research carried out in the first classes of thirteen primary schools in order to describe, analyze and understand how and why teachers dictate. Data collected and analysed for psychogenetic research into the acquisition of written language, and research into dictation carried out by Emilia Ferreiro in Mexico in the 1980s, show how dictation is a practice that is perpetuated in schools without the teachers really being able to justify its use. Examination of the data gathered has made it possible to detect a number of limitations in the practice of dictation as observed. First of all, there is no apparent consistency between the purpose for which teachers use dictation and the methods of dictation analysed: the continual instructions that the teachers give their pupils during dictation are hard to reconcile with the aim of verifying their acquisition of the relationship between phonemes and graphemes. Secondly, the texts used for dictation are poor in terms of lexicon, syntax and morphology: this limitation is even more evident when the content used by the teachers is compared with what the children write spontaneously. Lastly, this practice, which the teachers consider as useful for “teaching how to write” – in other words, indispensable for conveying the relationship between phonemes and graphemes – proves to be of little effectiveness for children in difficulty who, at the start of the year, still have not grasped this relationship.