Abstract

GERHARDT, Ana Flávia Lopes Magela; ALBUQUERQUE, Camila de Faro de  and  SILVA, Igor de Souza. Situated cognition and previous knowledge in reading and teaching. Ciênc. cogn. [online]. 2009, vol.14, n.2, pp. 74-91. ISSN 1806-5821.

The idea of previous knowledge has been widely used in studies which investigate reading activities in school, in search for ways to stimulate in students the capacity to read successfully every written text in school. In this paper, we observe previous knowledge under situated cognition parameters, which postulate the perspectival and interactive nature for cognition, and define that the person cognizes relatively to the perceptual/conceptual space where he/she is placed. In order to do this, we define cognition relativized to scenes, and reading being done through partial conceptualization of scenes observed in written texts used in reading activities. The task for school would be, taking the student´s partial view of the text and its scenes, determinate which features he/she can grasp, and help him/her to conceptualize the other features in order to achieve a reliable understanding of the text. We explain how this task can be accomplished through an example which shows how the student captures part of the scene and how its remaining features can be visualized. After this, we present a research which shows how the task of seeking the student´s previous knowledge to articulate it in a text activity needs to be done having in mind his/her universe or personal conceptualizations, which mostly are far from school expectations about how he/she cognizes

Keywords : reading; situated cognition; previous knowledge; conceptual scenes; school book.

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