Leitura e mídia virtual: a construção da competência lexical através do blog

Abstract

Reading is admittedly a complex process that involves psychological aspects (cognitive and metacognitive), biological and social. The reading process can be subdivided, facilitating studies and the search for solutions to problems in forming the proficient reader. Among the sub-processes that involve reading comprehension, there is the lexical competence; one of the determining factors in the formation of a (FINGER- KRATOCHVIL, 2009, 2010) strategic and critic reader. In recent years, reading has been the subject of numerous discussions and reflections, because tests show that many Brazilian adults have limited performance in this task. Given the requirements posed by digital technologies for readers in the 2000s, another issue that has also been noted are the virtual medias, which are gaining ground due to the expansion of the internet in recent years (COLL, Monereo et al., 2010). Researchers have investigated how virtual media can assist in the literacy process, in view of its new features and interfaces that allow a reading from new models (COSCARELLI, 1999; Leffa, 2006; Marcuschi, 2010). In order to cooperate with investigations into the reading proficiency at the Psycholinguistics bias, and its relationship with the Information Technology and Communication, this research has as main objective to investigate the contribution of the blog in the building process of reading competence from the development of the strategy of using the dictionary for the acquisition of lexical knowledge, considering their recursion and accessibility features. For this, we aim specifically: observe what strategies for acquiring lexical knowledge readers tend to use most often; check in which supports (paper or blog) readers do use dictionary more frequently; indicate in which brackets the interrupts of the flow of reading are more frequent and of longer duration; ascertain the level of reading comprehension of the participants when using the blog and printed materials as supports for reading. The research was conducted at Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (UFFS), with five educators from public schools (of basic education), from the urban area of Chapecó, adopting the experimental, qualitative and quantitative approach. Through this research and its methodological design, we seek to confirm the hypothesis that recursion and easy access to consultations offered by the blog interface (virtual media), favors the construction of lexical knowledge in reading tasks, reducing the breaking time of the reading flow, improving the process of reading comprehension compared to the reading on paper support. The results suggest some difficulties with the handling of text and with increasing cognitive load dispensed between the coming and going of scrolling of pages and text in the maintenance of working memory, as Wästlund (2007), the virtual media; which inhibited the use of online dictionaries available on the blog. However, the main factor seems to be the lack of some necessary skills to move around in the virtual environment, with the same ease with which they move in flip through pages of paper and consultation with a printed dictionary.