A critical and reflective comparison of the conceptions of reading emerging in the National Curriculum Parameters, the National Common Core Curriculum, and the Ceará Reference Curriculum Document

Abstract

This article aims to problematize the emerging conceptions of reading in three official documents on basic education: National Curriculum Parameters (PCN), National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC), and Ceará Reference Curriculum Document (DCRC). To carry out this critical reflection, we start from the conceptions of reading, considering the approaches that defend a sociopsycholinguistic model focused on the author-text-reader interaction. Under this parameter, it is understood that work with reading should be based on the principles of engagement in literacy practices and the development of reading strategies. Methodologically, we focused on Critical Applied Linguistics, an area that, among other things, stimulates reflections on teaching and, consequently, on the documents that govern basic education. We chose the above-mentioned documents as our corpus: the first two because they are references for the entire country; the last because it is a guideline for pedagogical practices in Ceará, an important federal unit in terms of educational figures. The data were subjected to a qualitative analytical approach. The results indicate that the documents are consistent with a sociopsycholinguistic perspective on reading, focusing on an interactional approach in which the teaching of reading strategies is the goal of reading instruction. However, while the PCNs adopt a more textual treatment of reading, in which the reader analyzes more aspects of cohesion and coherence, the BNCC gives priority to a discursive view of interaction, without angling a theoretical perspective to base teaching agencies on. The DCRC, in turn, endorses the conceptual commitment of the previous documents, without making the expected adaptation to the regional context of Ceará.