(Trans)formação do leitor de romance ficcional no ambiente escolar

Abstract

The present investigation arises from a problem: the fragility of literary text reading in the school environment, that is, the absence of this reading in a more frequent and systematic way in the Portuguese Language classes, as well as in the daily life of students outside the school. From this observation, the need arose to create strategies and instruments that promote the effective practice of literary text reading by students. The option was to read novels in the classroom, in the eighth year of elementary school, with the main objective of investigating students’ reading proficiency through the reading of fictional novels. As specific goals we adopted: analyzing data about students’ reading development in the aspect of meaning construction; Verifying advances and difficulties in the formation of reading abilities; Reflecting about the relation between literature and teaching, between literature and readers’ formation; Developing strategies which contribute to students’ reading competence . Methodologically this work is configured as an action research (THIOLLENT, 2011), that is, a classroom intervention, whose corpus of the research consists of the reading records made by students during the reading practices and the conduction and analysis by this teacher / controller. For this purpose, we used as tool the reading journal, theoretically based on Machado (1998), whose analysis provided us content about students’ reading performance in terms of the construction of meanings, advances and difficulties in the formation of reading skills. In the course of the analysis, the studies of Soares (1999), Cosson (2006) and Maia (2007), among others, were considered to provoke in the students the pleasure of reading, presenting instruments and support to assist them in the search process of a proficient and autonomous reading. The results built during the intervention served to observe, among other aspects, students' progress in terms of reading proficiency, as well as the relation between literature and teaching, between reading and readers’ formation, including in this case teachers, who need also to be proficient readers in order to be better able to act in the constitution of readers.