Estratégias metacognitivas a serviço da compreensão leitora: uma proposta com textos instrucionais e didáticos de Ciências

Abstract

Reading is a subject of knowledge that must be taught within its process while also being a means to other forms of learning. However, we notice that inexperienced readers do not reach reading proficiency due to school reading activities focusing on decoding texts, reading aloud, and reading comprehension questions to assess the reading outcome. Based on classroom experience and reading proficiency tests like the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), we have realized that the Brazilian reality concerning reading is far from ideal. In this context, we elaborated this thesis on an interpretative and propositional character with the general objective of characterizing reading comprehension teaching based on metacognitive strategies through didactic activities that use think-alouds, aiming to improve the reading comprehension of sixth-grade students in Elementary Education. To meet this objective, we devised the following steps: i. Define reading comprehension based on metacognitive strategies; ii. Develop instructional materials to promote metacognitive strategies in reading education; iii. Discuss the limitations and potentials of teaching metacognitive strategies within the context of reading comprehension education in Brazil. To do so, we base our work on the metacognition models of Flavell (1979), Brown (1987), and Schraw and Dennison (1994). We understand that the inexperienced reader (the student) may learn from the skilled reader (the teacher) metacognitive reading strategies that will assist them to become a good strategy user (Pressley; Borkowski; Schneider, 1987) and reach autonomous reading comprehension. For that, we propose a didactic material that prioritizes the use of think-alouds, as recommended by Davey (1983) and Block and Israel (2004), using passages from Science textbooks approved by the Brazilian National Textbook Program, aiming that, through the verbalization of strategies used by the teacher, it becomes possible to promote the acquisition of the same strategies by the students.