Aiming to define the profile and compare the reading/writing performance of 110 2nd grade children from five public schools, their reading and writing of isolated words/pseudowords and reading comprehension were evaluated. Through cluster analysis, three sub-groups were identified: high (86.36%) reading/writing performance; low (10%) reading/writing performance; and very low (3.64%) reading/writing performance. A total of 15 children (13.64% of the total sample) displayed some difficulty in reading and writing words. The differences in performance were not statistically significant for word reading, though the written performance of children from School 3 was significantly better than that of children from the Schools 1, 2 and 5. Even though all the studied schools were public schools in areas where the low-middle social class predominate, variable reading and writing performance was observed, more expressive in writing and reading comprehension.
Reading; writing; schools; comprehension; written language
