A leitura de notícias em textos impressos e digitais: um estudo de caso com leitores de diferentes níveis de letramento

Abstract

The advance of digital technologies suggests a multiplicity of reading modes. It is not sufficient just to master the alphanumeric code, it is necessary to be literate to exert social practices of language in distinct contexts, and employ the most diverse semiotic resources in both printed and digital environments. Thus, reading is a process of appropriation of meanings that happen in the interactive practice concerning the encounter between reader, author, and context. This relationship involves different readers, with distinct levels of literacy, who trace their own reading strategy for comprehending texts. Considering the theme of literacy and the studies that have been conducted in the field of reading related to the new social and technological context, this research investigates the relationship between reading and literacy in news text, in both digital and printed environment, from the identification of the reading process and the cognitive strategies employed by the reader through basic reading skills aimed to lexical processing, syntactic processing, and by inferences according to the levels of literacy/schooling. This investigation, of qualitative nature, consists of a multiple case study, comprised by six participants with distinct levels of literacy (two from primary school, two from high school, and two from university), categorized in two groups based on the criteria of access to digital technologies. This work is theoretically grounded on the studies of Street (1984), Soares (2002, 2003, 2016), and Kleiman (1995, 2016), in their works on literacy; on Kleiman's (1989, 2000, 2002), Kato's (1995), and Leffa's (1996) on reading and its strategies; and on Coscarelli’s (1999, 2002, 2010, 2016), and Ribeiro's (2003, 2008, 2018) researches in the field of digital literacy and reading in the cyberspace. Data collection instruments were the verbal protocols and the cloze tests. The results indicate that among participants of the same level of schooling/literacy there is no difference between reading in print or reading online. The posture and strategy of the participants are not determined by the reading mode, but by their own deficiencies and difficulties regarding individual process of reading concerning scholar literacy. The analysis also indicate that the lack of knowledge of the necessary actions or digital abilities to navigate in the virtual environment did not affect – although it may have caused discomfort – the processing of the form and the meaning of the users of the screen. This result shows that the practices of reading, printed or digital, go beyond a pre-established categorization and associate themselves with various factors like the interaction with the social, cultural, school, and academic contexts. Latly, this study suggests also a reflection about the necessity of working the reading as a divisible whole, showing to the reader the importance of basic abilities, from the lexic to the inferential processes, starting from the reading processing. It also highlights the necessity of the familiarity of the reader with the digital technology, the knowledge of the resources, and the ownership of multiliteracy to make it independent and active in their literate practices in the most diverse environments of reading.