Anaphoric Processing and Reading: a systematic review and considerations to teaching and learning to read

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between anaphoric processing and reading from a Psycholinguistic perspective, aiming to know and analyze Brazilian studies that relate these two axes and to propose deliberations for pedagogical implications to the teaching of reading. Thus, this article is characterized as a bibliographic research, carried out through the systematic review method and the study of the literature on reading processing, comprehension and teaching. The pieces of research analyzed through the systematic review are all experimental and their results show the processing cost differences generated by different anaphoric constructions. Regarding pedagogical implications, the deliberations are based on 1) reading has to be taught; 2) the text is the stimuli readers access to comprehend; 3) text nature and composition have direct implications in processing as well as in its result; 4) the written text is constituted by a web from which co-reference is an important part; 5) anaphor resolution is, therefore, central to text comprehension and it has to be explicitly and systematically taught, which means the point in the classroom environment is not the text analysis itself, but its analysis concerning the reader in a reading activity aiming at comprehension.

Keywords

• anaphoric processing
• teaching and learning to read
• systematic review