The biography textual genre as a resource to encourage the practice of reading in the English language / O gênero textual biografia como um recurso incentivador da prática de leitura em língua inglesa

Abstract

This work had as a general objective: to raise students' awareness about the practice of reading in the English language. The project, which originated this paper, had as theoretical support Brown (1994), Solé (1998), Siqueira and Zimmer (2006); Tomitch (2009), among others, to analyze the strategies of reading and comprehension in English; as for the conceptions of reading in English, they were approached from the perspective of Hadfield (2009), Périgo and Mota (2010) among others; and, concerning the genre of biography, Rosado (2005), Carino (2004), among others. The methodological development had the following steps: presentation of the concept of biography and its characteristics; presentation of reading strategies; selection of biographies to be read by students; production of activities related to the biographies; making records of behavior change of students participating in the project about the biographies; creation of quantitative procedures (questionnaires) to obtain data, as well as the collection, analysis, and description of data. This work was of great value for the students of a ninth-grade class of the elementary school of the Unidade Escolar Municipal Deborah Pereira because it provided them new experiences such as the opportunity to get in touch with reading in the English language, through biographical texts, as well as to know reading strategies to facilitate the understanding of texts in this foreign language.