Leituras no passado, leituras no presente: a apropriação de impressos por jovens leitores

Abstract

What do we know about the cultural practices of today's children? What specifically can we say about their reading practices? The objective of this research is to investigate the reading of children of the Second Cycle, students of an Elementary School, in Belo Horizonte city. Questions related to why, how, when, where and what someone read can be explored more vertically in studies that investigate the reading, the readers, and the uses that they make of different reading materials, contributing to the works of the Cultural History, History of the Book and Reading, Written Culture History, which are the base of this investigation. Researches about literacy, circles of reading and literary literacy also inspire this study. In order to develop this research, an initial survey about what children read was carried out through the application of a survey questionnaire with questions about their more general cultural practices, regarding to their reading practices and contact with written materials. After the analysis of the answers collected through the questionnaire, students that read magazines will be selected for interviews, in order to deepen the investigation about the reading of this type of printed material. These interviews will be conducted with participants of this research at the end of their Second Cycle training, in the 6th year of school. Preliminary observations in the 4th year class indicate that comic book magazines are the favorite printed materials of children in this stage of schooling, in the classroom or library. In this context, some questions remain: in the 4th year at school, why would children generally prefer this type of printed material to read? What would be their other reading options? Would their reading choices and preferences remain at the end of the Second Cycle? How, where, when and why do children read what they read?