Compreensão Leitora no Ensino Superior

Contribuições da Psicolinguística

Abstract

The research reported here was developed within the scope of experimental psycholinguistics and investigates the cognitive dimension of reading comprehension. It seeks to characterize the textual properties that may hinder the access to relevant information while reading and the skills necessary for the development of proficient readers to deal with different types of texts. Methodologically, the study articulates the approach of experimental psycholinguistics (which seeks to develop tasks that make it possible to collect data indicative of the processes involved in the perception, comprehension, and linguistic production) and the approach to the study of textual production formulated by the “plain language” movement. The research includes an experimental study conducted using a Cloze test with 88 undergraduate students from different courses to investigate their reading comprehension of texts classified as simple or complex. Preliminary results show that for the simplest text, there were no significant differences between students from different courses. The text considered more complex, in turn, presented relevant differences depending on the undergraduate course. The results obtained so far are compatible with those reported by recent studies that indicate a correlation between reading fluency and the choice of undergraduate course (SUCENA et al, 2022) and raise important questions to be considered in the configuration of students' academic paths in higher education.