Entre instituições de ensino e mercado de consumo : a leitura de narrativas em língua inglesa por adolescentes brasileiros

Abstract

This dissertation approaches literary reading preferences among Brazilian adolescent readers. Thus, we performed a research using ethnographic methods with two groups of participants: a) students in upper grades of elementary school from a private institution; b) academics of a Letras course double degree, Portuguese and English, from a public university. As research instruments, we used questionnaires and interviews in order to investigate the narratives read by participants that were not recommended by teachers, the mediators of their readings and their literary conceptions, and we discovered that the texts read were mostly foreign literature. This way, we tried to understand, based on the interpretative communities of Fish (1980), on the New Literacy Studies and on the Sociology of Reading, the perceptions of literature, reading, reader and literatures in English language (LEL) as part of a convention made by students and academics. We also researched on the adolescence phase because of its relevance to the understanding of the concepts utilized by readers and their reading preferences, since most students are early adolescents and most of the academics can be considered late adolescents. We verified that English language narratives circulate among the participant readers of the research, especially in translated form. Among their reading preferences, several best-sellers titles were mentioned, popular novels and, at the same time, marginalized. The results show that adolescent participants are part of interpretive communities of readers existing outside educational institutions; they use shared knowledge with those groups to construct meaning during the act of reading; they agree about their literary conceptions; they are into more than one interpretive community (school/college, friends), that is the reason why some of their conceptions are permeated both by the discourse of educational institutions and friends; they are influenced by cultural industry to choose their readings. In this sense, we justify this research by the contribution to discussions about the circulation and the teaching of LEL in Brazil, by the focus on the reader of narratives in English language and the shortage of researches on those subjects of study.