Reading as an interactive and discursive practice: an experience with the “difficult text” in the fifth grade of elementary school

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect upon the reading performed by some students of the fifth grade, based on the proposal of a literary text considered “difficult”. The idea of “difficult” in the school context has been presented as a result of the language’s complexity and the work’s context of production, in detriment of the student’s contact with the genre concerned. The experience reported on this article, was developed through sampling in a class of the fifth grade in a state public elementary school, throughout the observation of the students’ contact with the short story “Os óculos de Pedro Antão”, by Machado de Assis, in a situation of shared reading, which purpose was simply restricted to analyze how students interacted with the text. The discussion and analysis of results were supported by authors like Jouve (2002), Solé (1998), Freire (2009), Bakhtin (1997), Gotlib (2004) and the Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais (1998).