Leitores e e-books : novas formas de leitura e suas aquisições

Abstract

Immersive reading experience and e-books involve relations that may arise important cognitive acquisitions to individual development. They contribute qualitatively to the teaching-learning process and thus to Education as a whole. E-books, which are digital books, use a variety of technologies and hypertext programming languages, enabling innovative reading experiences through the interactions and cognitive acquisitions they can provide. The reading that occurs in this context is considered immersive due to the ability to engage the reader's attention around the "object" of reading, a process that is different from traditional sequential reading, which usually occurs with printed materials. The meditative reading has, on its turn, differences, since it happens in printed material. Based on that, the main purpose of this study is to analyze how reading happens using e-books and to understand the cognitive acquisitions acquired with the immersive reading experience. The question raised in this study has great importance to the education field, since, in contemporary society, technology promotes deep transformations in all areas, including in the educational one. Despite its importance, those questioning have not found much attention in the current academic literature, hence the importance of this study. The process of developing this work was based on qualitative methods for exploratory research. It was divided in two major phases: the first one involved the describing of subjects and their reading practices; the second one dealt with interview and with observations of immersive reading experience using e-books. The subject of this study were graduate, master and doctoral students of the Federal University of Mato Grosso. They were selected based on previously defined requirements. After analyzing and discussing the data found, it was observed that immersive reading experience of e-books produced some cognitive acquisitions which were categorized according to their form and to their content. In a generally point of view, e-books expanded the reading experience and produced new cognitive acquisitions to the subjects that took part in this study. It is highlighted that these cognitive acquisitions were reasonable aligned with the immersive potential of the e-books, even though the immersion criteria have not changed in the general context of the acquisitions of the subjects. It was found that the reading using e-books gave to immersive readers new cognitive acquisitions related to the structure and to the contents of the e-books. It is possible to conclude that the process of integrating the acquisitions acquired by the subject through their experience - information, concepts and meanings -, occurred by assimilation. They incorporate new information to the existing mental schemas, according to the theories of Jean Piaget regarding the genetic epistemology.