Compreensão de textos: Diferenças em função da modalidade de apresentação da tarefa, tipo de texto e tipo de pergunta

Abstract

Several factors that can influence the difficulty of the text comprehension tasks, and therefore the performance of the individuals, have been discussed in the literature. The goal of this study is to investigate if the difficulty of the text comprehension tasks varies as a function of the modality of the assessment task (oral versus written), the type of text (narrative versus informative) and the type of comprehension assessed by the questions (literal versus inferential). Three hundred students of the fourth grade were assessed using four text comprehension measures: Test of Listening Comprehension of Narrative Texts, Test of Listening Comprehension of Informative Texts, Test of Reading Comprehension of Narrative Texts, and Test of Reading Comprehension of Informative Texts. The results indicated the inexistence of statistically significant differences in the mean difficulty of listening and reading comprehension questions, as well as between the mean difficulty of questions related to narrative and informative texts and literal and inferential questions. No interaction effects were observed. The implications of these results are discussed considering their importance for the selection of the material to be used in the assessment and intervention in the text comprehension area. Some limitations of the study are also highlighted.