A compreensão leitora de alunos do ensino médio : um estudo a partir das questões de linguagens do ENEM.

Abstract

The goal of reading is comprehension (Seidenberg, 2013; 2021). In this sense, it is essential that the most structured social institution in terms of education – the school – provides students with an education that seeks to develop them for productive reading practices, enabling them to actively participate in the literate society in which we live. Therefore, the objective of this study is to contribute to studies on reading comprehension in high school, proposing a qualified pedagogical intervention, aligned with the science of reading, based on the identification of the reading skills required for the comprehension and resolution of questions in the Languages, Codes, and their Technologies section of the National High School Examination (ENEM). The pedagogical intervention, aligned with the skills foreseen by the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) for this stage, was based on research in the field of reading sciences. Thus, to determine which skills should be considered in developing the proposal, the methodology includes an analysis of questions from the Language, Codes, and their Technologies sections of the ENEM exam over the last five years (2020-2024), highlighting the main cognitive demands of participants in solving the questions. This analysis also served as a basis for developing a reading comprehension test, which was administered to students before and after the intervention to verify whether the pedagogical strategies employed through the teaching sequences were effective in helping students develop comprehension skills. To participate in the study, the sample consisted of 60 second-year high school students from a public school in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul. This selection was based on observations of the results of recent large-scale surveys conducted to assess the reading levels of students entering high school (and therefore potential participants in PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment), completing the cycle (Basic Education Assessment System), and testing the knowledge acquired in basic education (ENEM). Furthermore, the second year is an intermediate stage of high school, so it is possible to see what the student has already consolidated and what skills they still need to develop, with sufficient time to do so before the end of their schooling. The results indicate a low level of reading comprehension among the students, corroborating the data collected in the large-scale surveys. However, when pedagogical interventions focused on reading skills are applied, student performance improves, highlighting the need to align classroom strategies with studies in the science of reading, particularly regarding vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, this study can be considered an important contribution to research on reading comprehension in high school students, given that there are few surveys that collect data in this area with the aim of analyzing such data in order to propose interventions that help this population improve the quality of their reading.