Leitura compartilhada de contos com prompts baseados nas funções da narrativa : efeitos sobre a compreensão textual

Shared reading is the act of reading books aloud to a child or a group of children. This study assessed the effects of shared reading interspersed with prompts based on narrative functions on story comprehension. Twenty-two Brothers Grimm s fairy tales, one per session, were read to three children aged 8 to 13. In the simple reading condition, stories were read aloud without any additional interventions. In the dialogic reading condition, the storyteller interrupted reading at predetermined moments in the story to ask open-ended questions and differentially reinforce verbal responses under control of important narrative functions. All participants initiated the experiment in the simple reading condition followed by the dialogic reading condition, using a multiple-baseline across-subjects design. Comprehension was assessed by means of percentages of events and narrative functions cited during free retelling task followed by comprehension questions. In general, correspondence between the story and the child s retelling was higher in the dialogic reading condition than in the simple reading condition, but more for narrative functions than for specific story events. All children showed better performance when prompted by open comprehension questions than on the retelling task alone, especially in the dialogic reading condition (in the simple reading condition performance tended to be almost the same on both tasks). The roles of the text, prompts and differential reinforcement on story comprehension are discussed. Key-words: shared reading; dialogic reading; text comprehension, behavior analysis, verbal behavior