Literacy and reading: reflections on their conceptions and practices

Abstract

This article presents a brief qualitative reflection on the importance of reading in the first years of literacy of children from 6 to 8 years of age. Taking as reference authors such as Mortatti (2000); Freire (1994); Smith (2003); and data from the Ministry of Education concerning the situation of literacy in Brazil, we dialogued with the scholars Gatti (2009); Giroux (1999); Libâneo (2012); among others, with the main objective of understanding the teachers' conceptions about reading, as well as their practice in the classroom, guided by the hypothesis: literacy teachers have practiced reading as a simple act of codification and decoding, limiting textual meaning. We start from the understanding that the practice of reading is indispensable to any citizen for expanding the worldview by inserting a competent reader in our society. In this context, we reflect on the conceptions and practices of reading of three literacy teachers, from the 1st and 2nd year of elementary school, of a municipal public school in the interior of the state of São Paulo, and we conclude that, unfortunately, in the school context, thus preventing the formation of readers with analytical and critical capacity