Compreensão de leitura em adolescentes e fatores associados

Abstract

Introduction: The period of adolescence is characterized by the process of development, adaptations and biological, cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral changes. It begins between 10 and 13 years of age and ends between 18 and 22 years of age. According to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, for the year 2010, the total Brazilian population is 190,732,694 inhabitants, of which 17.9% are adolescents between 10 and 19 years old. During adolescence oral and written language is practically acquired, being, at the end of the period, similar to the language of an adult. However, on many occasions, we find adolescents who do not have a correct use of language and who present learning difficulties. Reading is a complex process that encompasses linguistic, cognitive, communicative, and social skills. The act of reading involves processes such as decoding, fluency, and comprehension, which is the primary goal of reading. However, for this purpose to be achieved, several factors are involved: the ability to identify words, cognitive processes such as memory and attention, writing exposure, vocabulary knowledge, metacognition, semantic skills, syntactic awareness and general knowledge about the topic read. By the start of middle school, adolescents are expected to have a good level of reading comprehension. However, the studies indicate that most of them can read, but they can not extract the most relevant ideas from the text. This low textual comprehension makes it difficult to formulate criticism, as well as school failure presenting as a consequence due to the difficulty in understanding the contents properly. The motivation for the present study arose because, in clinical speech-language practice, a significant number of adolescents with complaints of oral language disorders, difficulties and learning disorders are observed. However, we note in the national and international literature the scarcity of studies and instruments designed to evaluate oral and written language in adolescents, which hinders the diagnostic process and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the treatments. Objective: To develop a collective evaluation tool for reading comprehension for teenagers from 6th to 9th grade and to investigate its relationship with reading fluency, vocabulary, memory, attention and executive functions. Methods: 104 adolescents of both genders (66.3% female), aged 11 to 15 years, regularly enrolled at two public schools in the city of Belo Horizonte, participated in the study: 6th grade (n = 34), 7th year (n = 24), 8th year (n = 27) and 9th year (n = 19). The inclusion criteria in the study were: signing of the Term of Free and Informed Assent by the adolescent and the Consent Form by the person responsible; to be between 11 and 15 years of age and to be regularly enrolled in grades 6 through 9 in the participating schools. Were excluded adolescents with current or previous history of neurological or psychiatric diseases reported by those responsible, as well as individuals with uncorrected visual or auditory alterations, in addition to participants who did not complete the tests. Two studies were carried out, whose procedures of the first study were: the construction of an instrument for collective evaluation of reading comprehension of adolescents, the elaboration of the instrument involved seven stages with the participation of two judges. The instrument is composed of a narrative genre text appropriate for adolescents of elementary school and 10 multiple choice questions, being, five literal and five inferential questions. Through this instrument, the assessments of reading fluency and reading comprehension of the adolescents were carried out. In the second study, the adolescents were submitted to the following evaluations: Brief Neuropsychological Evaluation NEUPSILIN for the evaluation of attention, memory and executive functions; Boston Naming Test for vocabulary assessment; Oral reading of words and pseudowords to evaluate reading fluency of isolated items; Adaptation of the interpretation test of direct and indirect speech acts of the Montreal Battery for Communication Evaluation - MAC for evaluation of reading comprehension of sentences; and the instrument developed by the researchers for the evaluation of textual reading comprehension. The descriptive analysis was performed by calculating frequencies and measures of central tendency and dispersion. In the univariate analysis, Student's t-tests were used for comparison between two independent means; Anova to compare three independent means; and Pearson's Correlation to relate two continuous numerical variables. Variance analysis (One-Way ANOVA) was also applied, using the Bonferroni post hoc test for multiple comparisons. However, the analysis of the power of the tests and size of the effect was made through the calculation of Cohen. For the multivariate analysis the backward method was used, the significance of the final model was evaluated by the F test of the analysis of variance and the quality of the adjustment by the coefficient of determination (R2). The level of significance was of 5%. Results: In study 1, no differences were detected between the sixth and seventh grades, nor between the eighth and ninth grades, in any reading component. Based on these results, two groups were used to analyze the data: Group 1 (sixth and seventh grades) and Group 2 (eighth and ninth grades). The analysis of the instrument of collective evaluation of reading comprehension of adolescents evidenced improvement in reading fluency and comprehension with the advancement of schooling. The comparison between Groups 1 and 2 showed that there was a significant difference in the total correct answers of the questionnaire, in the total correct answers in the literal questions and in the total of inferential questions with medial size effect. The number of words per minute did not differ in the two groups. However, the size of the effect was enormous. In study 2, there were statistically significant associations between reading comprehension and accuracy reading of words and pseudowords, reading comprehension of sentences with direct and indirect situations, attention, general memory, short term memory and school year. In the correlation analysis it was verified that the correlations occurred between -0.009 to 0.526. There were statistically significant correlations between the comprehension of textual reading and accurate reading of words and pseudowords, reading comprehension of direct and indirect sentences, vocabulary, attention and semantic memory. The magnitude of the correlation was moderate for accuracy of reading words and pseudowords, reading comprehension of direct and indirect phrases, vocabulary and attention, and weak for semantic memory. The multiple linear regression was performed considering the total of correct answers of the text reading comprehension as variable outcome and the variables of the study that were significant at the level of p ≤ 0.20 as explanatory variables. The variables that remained in the final model were the number of pseudowords read correctly per minute and the vocabulary considering the total of correct answers. The result evidences that the increase of a pseudo word in the number of pseudowords correctly read per minute increases 0.03 in the overall score of general correctness of the reading comprehension. And the increase of a correct answer in the vocabulary total of correct answers increases by 0.17 in the overall score of overall correct reading comprehension scores. Conclusion: The instrument of collective assessment of reading comprehension is easy to apply and analyze and may help teachers, clinicians and researchers to measure adolescents' reading development. It was possible to verify the evolution of adolescent performance during the school years. There was improvement in reading fluency and comprehension with the advancement of schooling. The multivariate linear regression analysis showed that accurate reading of pseudowords and the wider vocabulary increase the reading comprehension capacity. Other skills such as word reading, sentence reading comprehension, memory and attention showed positive correlations with the reading comprehension, but did not remain in the final model of linear regression analysis. We emphasize the need for future studies in order to increase the number of adolescents evaluated. We suggest that the studies be carried out with adolescents from public and private schools, with and without learning disorders, in order to establish normative data for the instrument of collective assessment of reading comprehension.