Reading strategies and the reading comprehension: an action-research carried out in a High School classroom

This work, which is part of a more extensive research, aims to discuss about the theme of reading strategies focusing on their development. In this text, the main objective is to discuss about the development of a reading activity carried out in a 1st grade classroom of a public high school located in Sao Mateus-MA, with the participation of twelve students enrolled regularly. As the methodology proposed for this study, we adopted the action-research from Thiollent's perspective (1986), referring to a qualitative, descriptive and interpretative approach. The more extensive study was composed of six research instruments: two questionnaires, a diagnosis test, reading activities performed in the classroom and notes taken by the researcher during the research. In this paper, the main focus was only the use of reading strategies and the textual comprehension of the students from the reading of the text "queridos pais". For theoretical support, we used Boruchovitch (2001, 2007, 2005, 1999), Kintsch and Rawson (2013), Freire (2011), Portilho (2011), Smith (1989), Sole (1998), Kleiman (2008, 2009), Martins (2012), and others. The results that were found in our research tend to answer satisfactorily that the students of the 1st grade of high school make use of both cognitive and metacognitive strategies when they are faced with the reading of texts. In addition, through these strategies it was possible to perceive that they interfere in their reading competences in an active way, leading them to read and understand the texts, making them participative and autonomous readers considering their reading during classes.