Ensina-se a "ler" em inglês no Ensino Médio? : uma análise de materiais didáticos e da prática docente.

Abstract

Text reading demands complex cognitive capacities, permeated by a lot of experiences acquired during the lifetime, in the school and out of it, becoming an unique experience for each human being. This dissertation will present a study developed on the teaching of reading in English as a second language (ESL), in public schools in Rio Pardo Region, RS. The main goal of the work was to verify how teachers develop the reading activities in L2, as well as the form by which the chosen didactic material assists the development of the pupils’ reading ability. It was intended to analyze the levels of reading processing in the verbal and written exercises, the pedagogical form by which the text is comprehended in the L2 reading lessons, as well as the beliefs of teachers and students on reading in L2 and reading strategies. A questionnaire was applied to ten teachers of English and another one for their respective pupils with the objective of establishing a comparative framework between the two groups regarding questions involving reading in English as a foreign language and the didactic material used during the classes. Beyond the application of the questionnaires, data were also collected by the observation of two- hour lessons focusing in the subjects of the research. It was observed that the majority of the teachers did not follow all the steps considered appropriate for the accomplishment of a reading lesson and the answers of the teachers and students to the questionnaires did not match. Moreover, it was observed that the exercises of reading comprehension did not provide many moments of elaboration of inferences on the part of the pupils.