A leitura de textos em Língua Materna e Estrangeira com estudantes da EJA: Estudo de Estratégias

Abstract

Reading is an important cognitive process that depends on the reader`s understanding, in order to use his/hers decoding capacity, knowledge already acquired and different strategies to process and understand a text. The present research intended to investigate how students of English language discipline from EJA (Adult Education) of high school, process reading informational texts and the relations of comprehension between the mother tongue and foreign language. Initially, we sustain in theoretical and methodological reflections on the psycholinguistic area of literature, specifically, in the processing of reading in three approaches, in the perspective of text, the reader and the interaction between reader and text. Following, we revisited the literature on the reading process in the mother tongue and foreign language, with research contributions addressing the processing of reading, followed by the reading strategies, concepts and categorization proposed by Block (1986), the reading comprehension tasks, with emphasis on the structure taxonomy by Pearson and Johnson (1978), and verbal introspection instrument - the Pause Protocol (adapted by TOMITCH, 2003), which served as instrument for data collection and its transcription. The main focus of the analysis is on the different strategies used by the 11 participants in this study, when faced with printed informational texts in their mother tongue and foreign language, English. The data are presented, analyzed and discussed based on four instruments that directed the study, namely, the Pause Protocol, adopted to generate the verbalization of the participants` thoughts during the reading of three texts, i.e, one in English language and two in Portuguese language, to identify the strategies; fifteen reading comprehension tasks(five tasks for each text), with explicit, implicit and scriptually implicit questions; a retrospective questionnaire with self-evaluation of performance in reading activities, tasks and strategies; and in addition, the fourth instrument, the reader`s profile test (adapted from PISA, 2009) aiming to know the student as a reader and their reading habits. In the general discussion of the data, it is presented the crosschecking and the analysis of the four instruments. The data reveal that students of EJA used more General level strategies, which refer to the monitoring and understanding of the text as a whole, and less frequency in Local level strategies concerning the language units. It is evidenced that there were more occurrences of strategies, General and Local, in the reading activity of the foreign language text, a result that was not expected, because it was expected a better performance in reading activities in Portuguese language. Participants demonstrated that the use of strategies is very important to achieve the main objective of reading comprehension.