O processamento cognitivo da compreensão na leitura instrumental em inglês no Ensino médio profissionalizante

Abstract

The present study turns around to text comprehension in English under the ESP approach, in order to verify the strategic processing of text comprehension in the English language of professionalizing high school students. This theme has a meaningful relevance to languages teaching and learning, as well as to the processes involved in the comprehension of texts. The research took place in the Federal Institution of Education, Science and Technology of Bahia, campus Porto Seguro in the first semester (pilot phase) and in the second semester (the research in itself) in 2011. The pilot phase informers were students from the Integrated Technical Course in Food and the research in itself informers were students from the 4th semester of the Subsequent Technical Course in Food, and the 2nd and 3rd semesters of the Subsequent Technical Course in Informatics. Besides the students mentioned, 3 teachers contributed to the research, which was predominantly qualitative, in the form of a case study, since it was applied to a fixed number of informers inside a specific context of learning. In order to collect data, the author used questionnaires, text comprehension test, cloze test and verbal protocols. The work is based on the assumptions of the ESP approach, on the cognitive reading processing, as well as the reading models with a psycholinguistics basis which recognize cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies. In this perspective, the author used some authors’ contributions, among them, Kleiman (1989; 1995; 2002), Kato (2007), Leffa (1996), Tomitch (2008), Silveira (1999; 2005a, 20005b), Santos et al (2009), Ramos (2004 et al; 2005), Goodman (1967; 1987), Nuttal (1982) e Hutchinson and Waters (1987). All informers contributed with the researcher and accomplished all the tasks in a great way. In turns to the reading strategies, it was made clear that the majority of students activated background knowledge and identified the texts’ central ideas through simple inferences. However, it was verified that the students’ performance was damaged due to their difficulties related to the vocabulary and the systemic knowledge of the English language.