Títulos e macroestruturas textuais

Abstract

This study has the objective of verifying how university studentsunderstand the same newspaper text from the absence x presenceof different kinds of titles as well as questions previous to thereading. The starting point was the classification of the titles ascanonic and skewed: the first are those that carry the most importantinformation of the text, its main idea, working as a kind of summaryof the summary; the latter are those that promote information ofless importance to the category of the main idea of the text.A pre-experiment was carried out with the aim of verifying thehypothesis that a given title expressed the global macropropositionof a text, thus constituting a canonic title. After that an experimentwith seventy-five (75) students of the Language Course at a privatecollege in Belo Horizonte was undertaken with the objective ofverifying the extent of influence of the titles of different kinds andthe initial questions in the understanding, acting on the constructionof macropropositions and macrostructures.The results of the experiment showed that the titles and theinitial questions influence the construction of textual macrostructuresystematically, that leads to different interpretations of the same text.Canonic and skewed titles and the presence x absence of titles andinitial questions alter the interpretation of the same text in differentways.