Textual awareness

An alternative to develop reading and writing

Abstract

This paper is based on a research that turned out to be a Ph D thesis on the relation between reading comprehension, textual awareness and argumentative writing, basing specifically in psycholinguistic assumptions. The aim is to contribute to the improvement of educational practices related to reading and text production, considering the important role that consciousness plays in this process. Firstly, the research aims to verify the correlation among the variables in question. Secondly, it proposes pedagogical strategies that may enhance the reading comprehension and the writing of argumentative texts through textual awareness. For that, performance of seventy-four students from the first, second, and third grades of high school has been evaluated using specific tests. The analysis of correlation between two variables has been done separately, for each school grade, through the calculation of the Pearson linear correlation coefficient (r). The research results confirmed the correlation among the evaluated variables which were established under different indexes. From the data analysis, which offer important clues about the individuals´ behavior, the needs to stimulate early argumentative reasoning in schools have been postulated, based on reflection activities and on self-monitoring.