The integrative reading and the teaching of reading in textbooks of Spanish for final years of elementary school in Brazil

Abstract

Traditionally, reading studies have shown, often in a timeline, three views on how the information processing by the reader is given: bottom-up, top-down and interactive (top-down/bottom-up). Believing that the proposal of an interactive model today covers a variety of theoretical lines and different views on reading, here we seek to build a specific vision, which we are calling integrative. This view is based on classical studies in cognition articulated to studies derived from the Contemporary Cognitive Linguistics. We understand that reading is the result of successive conceptual integrations that occur online and in real time between the reader’s prior knowledge and the information brought by the text. Based on this, we understand that the process of generating inferences is an evidence of this integration and that it can be an important construct to apply our understanding of reading to the teaching. Thus, we use a cognitive view of this process to analyze activities presented in Spanish textbooks produced between 2004 and 2015. We also seek to evaluate how the participation of this discipline in PNLD contributed to changes in relation to reading instruction. Our results show a significant change in reading proposals presented by books over time, but also point to the necessity of considering the studies in cognition for the development of reading activities in school that could validate and develop the cognitive processes of the students and, therefore, his or her construction as an autonomous and critical reader.

Keywords: reading, cognition, textbook.