Concepções de leitura no material didático de inglês língua estrangeira para crianças de 8 a 10 anos: um estudo de caso

Abstract

As Brazilian children are being introduced to English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at increasingly younger ages, along with the rise of bilingualism and our experience teaching English to children, we became interested in researching the reading skills in English of children who have recently become literate in their native language, Portuguese. This paper, within the perspective of Applied Linguistics, aims to analyze the underlying reading conceptions of an English textbook for children used in an English Language School in Fortaleza, Brazil. The target audience of this material is students newly literate in their native language, aged between 8 and 10 years old. The students have used this material for one year, and this research focuses on the Student's Book used in the classroom. As for the theoretical framework, we mainly relied on the reading conceptions described by Cassany (2006). Additionally, we examined the definitions of reading proposed by various researchers, the situation of foreign language teaching in Brazil, and the use of specific textbooks for this purpose. This research also emphasizes the importance of textual genres and textbooks in the context of the classes; the reading perspective of the foreign language, based on Kleiman (2000) and Alliende and Condemarín (2005); the definitions of genre from the viewpoint of Bakhtin (2003) and Marcuschi (2008); the definitions of textbooks and the perspectives on EFL teaching presented by Tilio (2009). The methodological model adopted for this paper is predominantly qualitative, involving bibliographic research and a descriptive-interpretative approach to analyze the collected data. As a result, we have learned that the predominant reading conception underlying the aforementioned textbook is the linguistic one and that this textbook uses various textual genres within the reading activities. We also found that, even though they do not contain all the elements that characterize a particular genre, the texts meet the needs of the age group of the students who use the textbook under study.