Acessibilidade textual linguodidática : análise da complexidade de textos para o ensino de inglês como língua adicional

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Asafe Davi Cortina
• Orientador(a): Perna, Cristina Becker Lopes
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
• Departamento: Escola de Humanidades
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Complexidade Textual; Acessibilidade Textual; Acessibilidade Textual Linguodidática; Inglês como Língua Adicional; Coh-Metrix
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LETRAS
• Link de acesso: https://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/10695

Text accessibility and complexity are topics that have been researched in academic and linguistic fields for quite a long time, especially for fields such as Health and/or Law. However, studies that focus on texts used for teaching purposes are almost inexistent (even rarer are the ones that adopt numeric textual metrics to conduct the research). The theme of this Ph.D. thesis is a concept we call ‘Linguodidactic Text Accessibility’ (LTA), which refers to analyses of texts for teaching English as an Additional Language (EAL) and to adopting simplification strategies that are coherent to the students’ profiles. The main purpose of our research is the analysis of the complexity potential of lexical, semantical, and syntactical levels in texts used for interpretation exercises in the fourth edition of the books Elementary and Preintermediate by Oxford Press. To do so, we collected, using Coh-Metrix, the following metrics: Polysemy, Age of Acquisition, Familiarity with Content Words, Lexical Concreteness, Type-Token Ratio, Narrativity, Syntactical Simplicity, Syntactical Similarity, Referential Cohesion, and Flesch Index. By analyzing the orientations of each index and being guided by the description of reading abilities proposed by the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), we have interpreted the complexity potential of the texts in order to verify their adequacy (or lack thereof) for the specified audience. Based on the results, we present suggestions of simplification strategies that can be applied to potentialize the accessibility of the texts and, simultaneously, to optimize language learning. To corroborate our interpretation, we have also conducted a comparative analysis between the indexes of our texts and the results for the same metrics of texts that are priorly considered simple, and others that are complex. In addition, we have used the metrics to observe whether or not the complexity is progressively increased to ensure a coherent, gradual and continuous language development. Even though we focused on the books Elementary and Preintermediate, we also present a preliminary analysis of the texts of the Intermediate book meant to support the progression analysis and to offer information to justify future research with the other levels of the book collection. Our research shows that there are some elements of high complexity (mainly related to lexicon and semantics) in the texts, especially considering the profile of the students for whom they are proposed. 54% of the lexicon and semantics indexes of the texts from the Elementary book indicate low complexity, while 36% and 10%, medium and high complexity, respectively. In terms of syntax for the same level, 52% of the indexes are indicative of low complexity, 28%, of medium, and 20%, of high. The lexicon and semantics indexes of the Pre-intermediate book suggest that 43,63% of the metrics are indicators of low complexity against 37,27%, of medium, and 19,09%, of high. The syntax indexes of this level suggest 42,72% of low, 36,36% of medium, and 20,90% of high complexity. Our analyses as professors and linguists are also presented to help corroborate or refute the indication of the indexes once text complexity must take into consideration the reader to whom a text is proposed. In the last two chapters of this thesis, we present some specific suggestions of text simplification for the texts that were classified as having high complexity, and a succinct manual that explains how the indexes can be used to estimate complexity and, based on their results, guide language professionals to choose the most appropriate accessibility strategies.