Construção de inferências no livro didático: o que propostas de atividades nos contam

Abstract

In Brazil, at the moment when the second decade of the 21st century has almost ended, we have noticed that the discussions around the theme of reading, more specifically the reading comprehension, have been the subject of interest in different instances. In this sense, we observe that researchers, educators, evaluation systems, the media in general and government have been interested in the subject because of the low performances that Brazilian students have been obtaining in both international and national research aimed at analyzing reading skills. Among these evaluations, we highlight PISA, INAF and SAEB, the latter being through Prova Brasil. Considering PISA in specific, this program demonstrated that, in the period from 2000 to 2015, Brazilian students presented gaps regarding the reading competence (OECD, 2016). With the study of the domains based on this evaluation system, we can reflect, starting from Scliar-Cabral (2013), that one of the skills in which the Brazilian participants had the most failure in the test concerns the cognitive process of making inferences to solve activities of textual comprehension. When we observe that the textbook is now seen as one of the main supports that can help the teacher with the work related to Portuguese skills in the classroom, including reading, we have as a general objective of this dissertation the study about how the current Portuguese textbooks propose the accomplishment of Bridging and Elaborative inferences in reading and in questions of textual comprehension, considering the importance of this process to understand texts (KINTSCH, 2005). Based on a qualitative and quantitative approach in the analysis, we selected three volumes, from the six recommended by the PNLD 2017 to Portuguese-speaking teachers and students of the 9th year of elementary school, in order to study sections for reading, reading comprehension and the didactic recommendations provided to the teacher. At first, we identified the number of activities established as a proposal for the construction of Bridging or Elaborative inferences. In addition, we selected a sample of activities with inferences detected with the purpose of examining the adequacy (or not) of them considering the teachinglearning of inferences in reading classes and we observe the theoretical and methodological suggestions directed to the teacher of Portuguese in what refers to the approach on inferences, comprehension and reading. Finally, we establish strategies proposals to the teacher of Portuguese and reformulation of an activity based on a sequence of methodologies on specific contents with the purpose of assisting the reader-student in the construction of inferences in order to understand texts. The results indicate that the Portuguese textbooks of the 9th year studied in this research contemplate a large part of their activities of textual comprehension for questions that propose to the student reader the realization of Bridging and Elaborative inferences in the search of meanings for the text. However, it was possible to perceive that, even if the construction of inferences in reading activities is proposed daily, these materials tend not to help the student-reader with regard to the activation and learning of knowledge that we deem necessary for the required inferences are built successfully. Among these knowledge, we highlight the learning and development of the lexicon, a greater emphasis on the activation of previous knowledge of linguistic and encyclopedic character in the work with the text and a reading approach aimed at the integration with other domains of knowledge, the importance of the teacher in the planning of additional methodologies to the LD proposals with regard to the teaching-learning process of reading in the classroom.