Formation of Reader-Teacher: Reading Conditions and Comprehension of University Students

Abstract

This work aimed to (i) investigate the reading conditions of teachers taking an initial training, both within and outside the scope of such training, (ii) evaluate the reading comprehension of future professionals when interacting with different text genres, (iii) show the relationship between performance in reading comprehension and conditions of participation in literacy practices. Nine students from various degrees participated of the study, from the 4th period on, at a public university in Recife. We interviewed them to investigate their history of reading and we set a text comprehension task based on a chronic, scientific article and opinion article. It was found that the training courses for teachers favor the contact with text genres unfamiliar to students (e.g. scientific article), but keep them off other readings (i.e. for pleasure), also that the participants generally understood the three text genres and those who have more contact with other languages performed better on comprehension of the texts read.

Keywords

• text comprehension
• reading conditions
• text genres
• teacher training
• university