A compreensão leitora entre alunos do 7º ano do Ensino fundamental de uma escola pública do interior de Alagoas: uma pesquisa – ação interventiva

Abstract

Students from municipal public schools of our region, mainly in the interior of our state, have being presenting a serious deficit of reading comprehension and this has been demonstrated in the official tests during these last years. Based on authors such as Kleiman (1989) Silveira (2005, 2015), Leffa (1996), among others, this study is situated in the field of cognitive reading processes and had a purpose of providing a didactic experiment of intervention by the means of a reading comprehension didactic project using reading activities such as the multiple choice test used to verify reading comprehension and the cloze test which was used to verify students’ textual competence, that is, the perception of textual elements such as cohesion and coherence. In order to obtain a characterization of the students, a questionnaire was used, as well as some informal interviews. The research carried out is a qualitative one, more precisely seen as an action research which also has quantitative and interpretative aspects. The research was carried out in two 7th year groups of a municipal elementary school in the interior of Alagoas State, in the Northeast of Brazil, during the second semester of 2015, when 78 students participated in the research, but 12 of them were transferred, absent or dropout students. So, 66 students actually participated in the experiment. The objective of the study was not only to familiarize students with the tests, but also to increase their level of comprehension. Everything which happened during test application was registered in a logbook. The results were systematized and showed in graphics and tables and were also analysed through commentaries and ponderations. In these analyses, the author tried to evaluate if there was any improvement in the students’ performance in relation to reading comprehension. Finally, the author used interviews in order to evaluate some students’ attitudes towards their own performance. In relation to the results, 35% of the students reached to an increasing performance in the multiple choice test; 24% of them continued to be positively stable; 12% kept their deficit and 30% presented a performance between decreasing and oscillating. Many intervenient variables could have influenced these results, such as difficulties in rapid decoding, lack of a systematic reading practice and negative attitudes such as lack of motivation and interest in school learning. Despite of this, if the experiment could be longer, these results could be better, in the sense of students’ reading comprehension improvement.