Letramento escolar : um estudo sobre a retenção de alunos na 5ª série em uma escola pública do distrito de Iguatemi - Maringá/PR

Abstract

The learning and failure processes in fifth grade students of the primary school are provided through an analysis of data from a government school in Iguatemi, municipality of Maringá PR Brazil. A survey of the theory was based on social literacy (Cook-Gumperz, 1991; Kleiman, 1995) and on Educational Evaluation (Ludke,1986; Antunes, 2003) with special reference to problems involving reading-writing acquisition, literacy, reading, writing and evaluation as relevant factors in the teacher-student interaction within institutional environments. Data, produced by interpretative quality research, was collected by certain ethnographic research procedures (Erickson, 1989); by field work; by written evaluations late in 2005; by a 2006 questionnaire handed out to a member of the pedagogical team, to two teachers of Portuguese and to thirteen students who failed in the fifth grade in 2005 and to the parents of children taking part in the research; by a half-structured interview; and text collection undertaken by researchinvolved students. Data showed that reading practice has not been a constant exercise in the classroom; when it occurred the teacher's role has been that of a presenter and rarely as a mediator between the text and the student. Students rarely have other literacy practices in class since the school is merely concerned with school literacy shunning other literacy practices. Autonomous literacy (Kleiman, 1995) has been the guiding principle within the classroom. From the student's point of view writing in school is the fulfillment of an evaluation test and writing is done as the teacher's assignment. The teacher's interaction process vis-à-vis the student's text is not achieved since the text is given ready made. This particular school is characterized by a formative evaluation since there is a student's selection and classification process at the end of the scholastic year. Data show that the school must analyze its evaluation process and make it clear to the students what will be evaluated and how they will be evaluated.