Estudo da compreensão leitora de futuros professores: análise de resumos produzidos por estudantes de graduação no projeto OBEDUC "Ler & Educar"

Abstract

In Brazil, the theme concerning reading and understanding has gained importance in recent years, especially since the national assessments (SAEB/Prova Brasil and INAF) and the international ones (PISA) have revealed the low performance of Brazilian students. In general, data has shown that the reading competence of most students assessed does not go beyond the ability to find explicit information in short and familiar texts. Such data lead us to question many of the practices developed by schools and known as "reading activities", which, actually, do not provide reasonable elements to verify the degree of understanding by the reader in face of the material to be read. From this concern, this study tried to shed some light on the activities of summarization, common pedagogical practice, both at school and in the academic environment. Given the scenario described, this study aims to assess the level of reading comprehension by graduate students from undergraduate courses, expressed through summaries produced during their participation in the project OBEDUC “Ler & Educar”, aiming at contributing to the training of future teachers, relating features that might influence the performance of the subjects as readers and pointing the reading skills they demonstrate to use (or not) in the summarization activities. Theoretical foundation for this analysis is the comprehension model named construction-integration (CI) model (KINTSCH,1998; KINTSCH; VAN DIJK,1978) which provides wide explanation of how knowledge is used in comprehension and mental processes involved in the processing of reading, and contemplate in their summarization activities as a way to assess the ability of reading comprehension. Based on the presuppositions within the model, we have accessed the macro-structure of the basis texts, target of the summarization activities, determined the main ideas and compared them to the ones evoked in the summarizations by the undergrad students. In order to explain the performance of participants, we have related their performance to factors such as the previous knowledge about the theme inside the texts summarized and the use of macro-rules. As to pointing the reading skills we have related the performance by the participants to the domains “Location and Retrieval” and “Integration and Interpretation” presented by PISA 2012 proficiency index. The results demonstrate that the continuing education activities by the project OBEDUC “Ler & Educar”, which involve summarization, influence the previous knowledge and improve the reading comprehension by the undergrad students. However, there is evidence that the performance is also influenced by variables (summarization production conditions), which are not controlled by the survey. Undergrad students use the macro-rule of erasure/selection to perceive inherent aspects to the main idea and, thus, and evoke (through different structures) the most prominent pieces of information from the text surface. However, as the amount of information increases and the presence of topic sentences decreases, being the task for the reader to infer them and to create them, they demonstrate difficulties to determine the inherent aspects to the main idea, and, thus, they fail to use generalization and construction/integration. As for the summarized texts, most of the participants of the survey demonstrate fragilities using the reading skills from level 4 within PISA 2012 proficiency index.