Análise das estratégias de compreensão idiomática do 1º ao 5º ano escolar

Abstract

The thesis entitled An analysis of idiom comprehension strategies from the 1st to 5th grade had as main objective the investigation through an online perspective of how children from the first years of elementary school reconstruct idiomatic referents present in cartoons for kids, by using an interpretivist analysis of Idiom Comprehension Strategies (hereinafter ECI) by them applied. These strategies, adapted from Wray, Bell and Jones (2016), stem in our thesis from the intersection of studies on Phraseology, Text Linguistics (hereinafter LT) and Visual Design Grammar (hereinafter GDV). The methodological approach adopted contemplates the application of semi-structured interviews to twenty-eight participants from the 1st to 5th grade, of which the second phase is composed by a general question about the idiom being tested, and the third phase has guiding questions on ECI usage, being both based on the reading of Monica’s Gang and Zé Carioca comic strips. For the second and third phases of the interviews, the answers obtained from the participants were analyzed based on the ECI used and accordingly to the System of Classification for Idiom Comprehension (hereinafter SCCE), adapted from Nippold and Martin (1989), so the answers achieved the value of ‘correct’, for the adequate referential reconstructions, and ‘incorrect’, that, on the other hand, would be divided into ‘literal’, ‘related’, ‘unrelated’, ‘restatement’ and ‘no response’. Data revealed that (i) in a holistic way, considering idiom comprehension of all grades, there was an increase of 46.5% in the amount of correct answers from the second to the third phase, thus demonstrating the main role that ECI perform in the process of idiom comprehension; (ii) ECI of contextual use and the perception of visual resources appeared in all grades, suggesting that the participants use them recurrently and, also, they attach these strategies to their previous knowledge as a way to reconstruct idiomatic referents; and (iii) data suggest, from the analyses of ECI and the answers classified in accordance with the SCCE, the existence of four distinct levels of idiom comprehension for children on ages between 6 to 11 years old. Likewise, this thesis accomplished not only the intent to analytically understand the processes that underlie the comprehension of lexical idiomatic items, under a pragmatic perspective, but also to observe new studies on Phraseology, so that the referent is not given before the interactive act, but constructed as the reader creates new associations within the text.