Banca de DEFESA: CICERO NESTOR PINHEIRO FRANCISCO

THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF DIGITAL GAMES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF READING PROFICIENCY IN ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE.

Reading. English proficiency. Digital games. Neuroscience.

Among the various approaches to applied linguistics, there is a concern about how linguistic principles can be used, in a pragmatically used to solve real-world problems, thus motivating the present thesis. Based on our observations of the practice of English Reading (ER) by public school students, we found that this communicative ability is configured as incipient and often uncomfortable for these individuals, despite being a crucial linguistic skill in an increasingly globalized world. To promote the increase of reading proficiency in ER, we investigated the influence of students' habit in reading in digital games, leveraging a practice that seems to be common in most young people today. In order to examine the relationships between the reading habit during interactions with games and the improvement of proficiency in an additional language, our research takes on a translational character due to the use of a theoretical foundation from concepts of various areas of knowledge. We are anchored in a theoretical framework from linguistics researchers, focusing on studies related to the practice of ER; neuroscience, as we seek to understand how our brain learns and the intrinsic brain mechanisms related to reading; and the pedagogical use of digital games to explore the potential that games can offer to the educational environment. Our epistemological stance enabled us to investigate whether games can be used as a pedagogical tool for promoting English reading proficiency. Thus, from a corpus produced by five high school students, we analyzed the interaction of these young people with digital games and observing elements such as the time of exposure to games, the arrangement of texts in the respective digital environments and the strategies developed by the researched subjects to interact with the texts in ER in the virtual environment. The data collected allowed us to confirm that, by engaging in the pursuit of objectives proposed by the games, students apply their reading ability in a practical manner, with specific and well-defined purposes. These factors facilitated an instructional, active and dynamic involvement with reading in ER, demonstrating that interaction with digital games can be a relevant pedagogical resource for the development of reading proficiency in ER.