Análise das estratégias bottom-up em livros didáticos de português para estrangeiros segundo a teoria da atividade

Abstract

This study aims at investigating how authors of Portuguese for foreigners textbooks work with the reading ability in relation to the use of the bottom-up strategies. In order to verify how the relation between reading ability and linguistic competence works, I have decided to analyze the reading sections of four Portuguese for foreigners textbooks that are been used nowadays and which contains the teacher s book. First of all and within this context, the methodology of data analysis was based on Leontiev s version of Activity Theory (1977), for the purpose of identifying what actions are developed by the student during the activity of learning Portuguese and checking whether these actions may become operations. Secondly, it was found theoretical support in Richter s Holistic Model (2004, 2005) as a way to describe the reading tasks of those textbooks and elaborate a model of a standard class. This model which was based on an interactive reading teaching and applied to a complex spiral vision, was compared to the corpus of this study, to verify what material would be closer to the ideal one for internalization of specific formal items. The study theoretical support was centered in the following aspects: textbook as a genre; Vygotsky s social-interactionist teaching, emphasizing key-concepts as mediation, internalization and zone of proximal development; Activity Theory, textbook according to Activity Theory; reading and cognition and reading models. The results suggest a tendency of the authors of the analyzed corpus to consider the bottom-up strategies as irrelevant ones for the student to construct the meaning of the text.