Educação e linguagem : os mecanismos coesivos na compreensão de problemas de aritmética

Abstract

As the Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais indicate, one of the purposes of Elementary Schools in Brazil is that students should be able to question reality by formulating problems and trying to solve them (PCN, 1998, p. 27). In that same perspective, one of the purposes in Mathematics for the third cycle, which corresponds to the 6th grade in Elementary School, is that students should be able to solve problem-situations involving, natural numbers, whole numbers, and rational numbers and from those situations be able to enhance and build new meanings for arithmetic operations (op. cit., p. 64). Thus, Mathematics can give its contribution to citizens, by providing the construction of strategies, the evidence and justification of results (op. cit., p. 27) towards the development of the capacity of solving problems, whether they belong to this or any other area of knowledge. Teaching Mathematics does not only have the obvious function of providing the development of competences related to handling with the most varied mathematical abilities, but it must also be concerned with the promotion of the development of abilities such as communication, argumentation, and process validation (PCN, 1998, p. 56). These abilities, on their turn, require abilities of written and/or spoken expression and interpretation. Learning to solve mathematical problems at school means facing a world of concepts that involves reading and comprehension both of one‟s native language and of mathematical language. Solving problems requires reading comprehension. For that comprehension, students need to have some linguistic references and to express data in mathematical sentences they need to have some mathematical references, which should be appropriate according to each problem-situation they are exposed to. Offering learners opportunities to understand the problem utterances should certainly help them not only solve the problems but also to widen and improve their ability to establish inferences and logical connections. Many studies have been carried out about reading and about difficulties in solving problems, although very few have put these two areas of knowledge together. The purpose of this study is to verify how cohesive mechanisms, which are present in the utterances of arithmetic problems, can become intervenient factors in the reading comprehension of those utterances. The author believes it is possible from that point of view to catch a glimpse of ways of making studies of native language get closer to studies of mathematical language in what concerns the comprehension of arithmetical problem utterances. The study starts from the assumption that if the arithmetic utterance is not understood, that compromises the conversion of the data presented in mathematical language and, hence, compromises solving those problems.