Os exercícios de compreensão na coleção português linguagens: atividades de copiação e reconhecimento ou orientações para o exercício da cidadania?

Abstract

The reading - and its subsequent understanding by the reader-listener - is one of the most significant elements of, in and for the cultural education of a nation and, in particular, in the life of a person. Designed as a process of (re)construction of meanings on the text that we are intending to understand, the comprehension hodiernally presents itself as an operation that transcends the mere ability of decoding and identification directions and permeates all our activities in society. Prompted by the explicit relation reading-comprehension-citizen reader, this study aimed itself to investigate whether the comprehension exercises present in the collection Português Linguagens, a didactic collection focused on teaching high school students, were actively contributing and/or allowing the formation of a critical-reflective reader, questioning, ultimately, if the exercises, in fact, prepared for the full exercise of a citizen attitude, or represented mere activities of copying, transcription and recognition of parts of the text by a passive reader, who has before himself an activity that separates the language from its real sphere. As for empiricism to be analyzed in this investigation, it will consist of some comprehension activities present in the volumes of the referred collection, those activities related to texts in order to arguing. The anchoring of this research was guided and grounded on the conception of language and ideas of Bakhtin’s Circle (1997, 1999, 2003, 2010) and on its subsequent deployments, to name, notions of dialogism, interaction, active responsive attitude, social voices, exotopia, alterity, and concrete enunciation, among others. In this investigative path, we found that the analyzed activities do not allow active responsive understanding as this is understood by Bakhtin and the Circle, and do not deepen the understanding nor lead to a critical reflection about the text, showing in evidence an excessive preoccupation with formal aspects of the text or a reduction of understanding work to the identification of objective and superficial information. The study developed here was inscribed within the field of Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 2006, 2004) and was characterized by a qualitative-interpretativist approach (CHIZZOTTI, 1991, 1998; ALVES-MAZZOTTI & GEWANDSZNADJER, 1998; LAVILLE & DIONE, 1999). The research showed relevant data, so the school - and in particular the Portuguese Language teacher - revise its conduct and rethink its practice as socially established agency, which has as one of its functions in society the formation of a conscious critical-reflective citizen reader.