ABSTRACT
The early teaching of written literacy is extremely important for a child's whole school life but it is still more important for socially vulnerable children, to whom the school is frequently the only reference in the learning process. School failure indexes in Latin America as well as in other developing countries with regard to early reading instruction are very high. Most research relevant to literacy has been directed at awareness of the sound structure of words that is at meta-phonological awareness. Teaching how to read and write successfully is directly related to procedures that allow learners to develop metalinguistic skills. Metalinguistic skills refer to phonological, syntactic, lexical, morphological and textual linguistic processing, among others. However, there is a huge gap between academic research and literacy teaching practices. Government policies are not sufficiently influenced by these research results and literacy teachers have too little access to them.
