Leitura: interação entre compreensão, memória e emoção

Abstract

This thesis was developed from the understanding that the act of reading involves much more than the simple understanding of writing and/or its processing, since an interrelation of different levels of knowledge of the reader is built. The studies of Leffa (1996), Solé (1998), Marcuschi (1985;2008), Kleiman (1993;2009;2011;2012;2013), Damásio (1996; 2010), Izquierdo (2002), Larrosa(2004), Cosenza (2011), among others, theoretically support such understanding, while advocate that reading provokes emotions that have influence on the reader, which may or may not lead to their involvement in the act of reading and, consequently, contributes to their understanding and, also, to their memory in relation to what they read. This academic production was designed with the objective of investigating to what extent the preference for a text, taking into account the predominant emotional charge, can favor the assimilation of content, the understanding and the recall of that reading. In this way, it was possible to promote significant reflections on the teaching and practice of reading in Elementary School. For this investigation, about the effects arising from the preference of a text, some texts made by students were selected, all of which prompted the generation of data from the tasks performed by three groups of sixth, seventh and ninth grades, in order to verify the cognitive behavior resulting from the emotional charge of the three texts. This methodological approach proved to be useful to achieve the specific objectives outlined, which are: a) verify the students´preference between three texts with different emotional charges; b) analyze whether the chosen text and its respective emotional charge (E+, E- or N) contribute positively to the participant's performance in the proposed tasks: the content assimilation test and the comprehension test; c) better understand if the result obtained in these two tasks also interferes with their performance in the memory test. In this methodological course, at first, the texts were distributed for reading and then there was the application of the following four tasks: the preference questionnaire, the assimilation test, the cloze test and the memory test. For the analysis, the Kruskal-Wallis test was used (nonparametric variant of ANOVA), considering that the data did not meet the ANOVA assumptions. It was possible to show, through data analysis, that the emotional charge had a significant effect on all tests performed, but its effect on preference and on tests was different. Thus, texts with intense emotional load, regardless of being happy ones or sad ones, generated superior results in the tests, when compared to text with neutral load. This result confirms the thesis guided by this work, that emotional factors are closely related to memory and understanding. In other words, the result of the research presented in this thesis confirms that a reader who is in contact with emotions in reading, for example, will more easily remember the text in which intense emotions such as joy and sadness predominate.