Compreensão de textos argumentativos por leitores do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This present work, entitled Comprehension of Argumentative Texts by middle school Readers, examines comprehension of argumentative texts from the analysis of summaries and the application of cloze reading tests. Students from naddle school, aged 12 to 15 years old read two types of argumentative texts (argumentative with dialogical trend – TAD and argumentative with expositive trend – TAE) and were asked to produce summaries of each one of these texts. The resulting summaries were analyzed according to several aspects (identification of main ideas, quality of the summarizing strategies, explicitness of internal organization and progression of information) in order to verify differences in comprehension related to the identification of main ideas of each summarized text and to the level of the reading comprehension of the pupil. Two hypotheses were tested: the first was that proficient readers would more easily identify main ideas in TAE than in TAD, due to the apparent more neutral structure of the of the first one; the second was that these same readers would better explicit the internal organization of TAE, because of their easier processing due to the progression of information, which is based on a theme/proposal scheme. The several analysis revealed evidence of a better performance to TAE compared to TAD. Concerning the identification of main ideas, the readers identified from 38,46 to 76,92% of the total of main ideas in TAE, while in TAD they identified 23,52% to 52,94%. The analysis of summarizing strategies showed that readers used more sophisticated strategies (inferences, integration of information) to TAE compared to TAD, in which they failed in the attempt of using these strategies. Concerning the explicitness of internal organization (specially to TAD), they presented more problems of sequential continuity and semantic progression, besides incongruent enunciates.