Um estudo da compreensão leitora em indivíduos inseridos em contextos sociais diferentes

Abstract

This research aimed to investigate the impact of the inferiential universe of individuals in reading comprehension, analyzing the different interpretations made of Mafalda‟s strips. The study developed a qualitative and a quantitative analysis of the inferential ability of two groups of participants, with ages between 14 and 22, in their final year of elementary school. One group comes from regular public school and the other in the special EJA modality, also in a public schools. The study differentiates itself from other regular ones due to investigating the influence of previous experience of the participants, since it examines the reading comprehension of a group of individuals who live in extreme poverty, in total risk and social vulnerability, consisting of homeless people with history of drug addiction. Among the theoretical references, the contribution of Dell‟Isola (2001), Coscarelli (2003), Madruga (2006) and Flôres (2007, 2008) can be pointed. The qualitative data analysis was performed using the classification of participants' responses according to the horizons of textual comprehension proposed by Marcuschi (1996, 2008).In this analysis the questions regarding the strips were divided into subjective and objective questions in order to verify whether the use of objective questions in survey instruments could influence the participants‟ performances. There was a considerable improvement in the performance of groups in carrying out the true or false task, compared to performance in the subjective part of the experiment. It was observed that the regular school group outperformed in 9% the group of participants in a street situation (EJA). As for pedagogical implications, this study points to the necessity of the educational system to evaluate the way how text comprehension has been assessed and worked on within the school environment, since a text has multiple potential meanings and will be read in different ways, depending on the place that holds the reader, their beliefs and their world view.