Letramento digital: estudo sobre práticas escolares de leitura e escritura no computador vivenciadas por alunos/usuários da rede pública de ensino

Abstract

In our scientific study, we have focused on the digital literacy in a public school setting, with the broader aim of trying to understand the approach of students/users towards writing in face of the new text support, the computer. The three key questions to guide our research were: what kind of access and frequency do students/users have to computers in a school context? What behavior do students/users who have the opportunity to interact with this new type of text in school assume? What strategies do students/users take up in order to process, select, retrieve and produce information on the computer screen at school? We have worked, throughout this research, with theoretical references based on Magda Soaress literacy studies; Roger Chartier and Pierry Lévys investigative considerations on the changes both of writing support and of readers/authors behavior and Bakhtins dialogism concept. Under a qualitative methodological perspective and ethnographic approach, the field work was characterized by the use of the following strategies: observation and cassette tape recording of informatics lessons in classes of children between nine and fourteenth years of age (classes named in the researched schools as: ciclo intermediário and terceiro ciclo), where reading/writing practices using digital support took place; questioning of all the students in the observed classrooms and interviews of all those more directly involved in the research; analysis and evaluation of all data collected during the development of the study. From the data collected, we have recognized three analytical paths, based on the three key questions of the research: regarding access and frequency, we dealt with the ways of contact, the programs, text types and virtual environments the students/users use at school; regarding gesture and behavior, we have analyzed the student/users ways of acting during the process of acquiring digital writing; regarding the strategies and production of digital text, we have thought about what is old and new in the digital text reading and writing procedures taken up by students/users.