the THE IMPORTANCE OF A READING FAMILY IN CHILDREN'S LITERACY

Abstract

This paper is in line with research related to literacy, specifically on the formation of readers. Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), extracted from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), in 2022, show that Brazil is not a country of readers. PISA found that Brazilian students have large gaps in skills essential to reading comprehension. Reading difficulties have diverse causes and are not restricted to the walls of the school; there are social and political factors that impact the formation of readers. Decoding the language, although essential, is not a sufficient condition for the formation of a reader, given that reading the world precedes reading words. If the language is not understood in real situations of social use, the attribution of meanings to the word will be incomplete, since, due to pragmatic phenomena, the meaning exceeds the semantic definition and is based on the context. Playful emergent literacy and decoding the language comes together as child attributes to the word the meaning that he or she was able to infer from the context in which it was used. Children begin reading about the world even before they start school; it happens in their families. Given that children born into reading families tend to absorb the taste and habits of reading observed at home, it is plausible that the deficit in students' reading skills points, to some extent, to a decrease in the number of reading families or their reading habits. This study, based on documents, aims to shed light on the great influence that families have on the formation of reading habits. For this purpose, quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out on data obtained by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (IBOPE Inteligência) in the 5th Edition of the Portraits of Reading in Brazil survey, based on 2019, which conducted home interviews with 8,076 people aged 5 or over, literate or not, in 208 cities across the country, to define the profile of readers in Brazil. At the same time, in a bibliographic review, doctrinal bases were raised that corroborate the importance of families in the formation of readers. In the end, it will have been demonstrated that literacy is a process of acquiring reading and writing that, due to the great influence of the family environment, cannot be limited to school.