Compreensão de textos de diferentes tipos por crianças da Educação Infantil

The study investigated the listening comprehension of narrative, expository and argumentative texts in children of Early Childhood Education. The objective was to examine whether the level of understanding would vary according to the type of text, and to identify the nature of the difficulties experienced by children in relation to the establishment of inferences in each of these texts. Thirty children (mean age of 5 years and 8 months) were asked to answer inferential questions (causal and state) about each of the texts that were read to them. It was found that the level of comprehension varied according to the texts, since the children were more likely to understand the narrative text than the other ones. On the other hand, children showed the same level of difficulty in the expository and argumentative text. The main difficulty identified was in relation to the understanding of the causal relations in the expository text. Educational implications are discussed to promote early interventions to develop listening comprehension of texts even before the child can read. This implication gives Early Childhood Education a relevant role in the development of language skills that are predictors of reading comprehension in subsequent school years.