Reading, Text and Sense

You sure have heard about the importance of the habit of reading in our lives, right? It is essential that this habit is cultivated among children and young people, and for this reason, the participation of the family and the school in this process is important. These two agents are responsible for the formation of competent readers, capable not only of decoding the code, but also to interpret and assimilate information, which will later be transformed into knowledge.

However, we rarely stop to think about what reading is. Nor do we ask ourselves why and how to read. These questions can be answered in different ways, which will reveal a conception of reading arising from the conception of subject, language, text and meaning that is adopted. It is unquestionable that reading is an activity to capture the author's ideas, which also depends on the experiences and knowledge of the reader. It is an activity that requires the reader to focus on the text, on its linearity; thus, the reader performs an activity of recognition, reproduction and interpretation.

Reading must be understood as a text-subject interaction. In this way, we can affirm that reading is a highly complex interactive activity of production of meanings, which takes place based on the linguistic elements that are present in the textual surface and in its way of organization. The experiences and knowledge of the reader must be taken into account, who needs to present more than the knowledge of the linguistic code: you must also have the linguistic competence to decode what is being being read.

Reading is not a passive process: it is up to the reader to carry out an active work of understanding and interpreting the text. starting from your goals, your knowledge about the subject, about the author, everything you know about the language etc. It is from the processes of selection, anticipation, inference and verification that the true reading takes place, as they allow the reader control what is being read, thus making decisions in the face of comprehension difficulties so that he can advance in the search for clarifications. The reader is, therefore, a constructor of meaning, an active subject in the process, and not just a passive receiver.

It is also worth remembering that the interaction between the content of the text and the reader depends on their motivation and intention, given that the process is always governed by the reading objectives. For example, we read newspapers and magazines (physical or virtual) with the clear objective of keeping ourselves informed; other texts we read with the aim of producing academic works (dissertations, theses, books, scientific journals); there are still those that we access for the purpose of pleasure (poems, short stories, novels) and of course, those that we consult (dictionaries, catalogs) and also those that we are obliged to read (manuals, leaflets). It doesn't matter the genre or text type: what will guide the reading are the reader's objectives.

Once we consider the fact that reading depends on the reader's knowledge, we also accept that the same reading can generate a plurality of meanings: the same text can establish, for different readers, a diversity of meanings. senses. So that we do not extrapolate the meanings of the text, it is essential that we pay attention to the signs in the text. There are texts that allow for a greater variety of meanings, and this will depend on how it was constituted. See just one example:

I do not love you anymore
I'll be lying saying that
I still want you like I always wanted
I am sure that
nothing was in vain
I feel inside me that
you mean nothing
I couldn't say more than
I feed a big love
I feel more and more
I already forgot you!
And I will never use the phrase
I love you!
I'm sorry but I have to tell the truth
It's too late.

Did you read the poem? Now try reading from bottom to top:

It's too late.
I'm sorry but I have to tell the truth
I love you!
And I will never use the phrase
I already forgot you!
I feel more and more
I feed a big love
I couldn't say more than
you mean nothing
I feel inside me that
nothing was in vain
I am sure that
I still want you like I always wanted
I'll be lying saying that
I do not love you anymore.

Did you see? In relation to the text, the same reader will be able to carry out two diametrically opposed readings: in the reading carried out from top to bottom the thread conductor I don't love you anymore will guide the production of meanings, while in the reading carried out from bottom to top the guiding thread being me you I love. We want to highlight, by way of example, that the same text can produce a variety of readings!

This variation in the production of meanings can also result from linguistic factors present in a text, factors that can make comprehension difficult, such as: the lexicon (set of words of a certain language); complex syntactic structures characterized by an abundance of subordinate elements (subordinate clauses); cause/effect, spatial, temporal relationships; absence of punctuation marks or inappropriate use of these signs.

How, then, to prevent such factors that compromise text interpretation? We need to dedicate ourselves more and more to the mission of reading, reading more and always, so that we can achieve proficiency in the Portuguese language. In order to understand the various texts to which we are exposed on a daily basis, it is necessary to interact with them, an interaction that must be dynamic, and which will depend on the reader's knowledge.

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“If reading is a meaning-building activity that presupposes author-text-reader interaction, it is necessary to consider that, in this activity, in addition to the clues and signs that the text offers, the knowledge of the reader".

Ingedore Villaça Koch

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Luana Alves
Graduated in Letters