BOOKS BY GABRIELLA AGRUSTI

Molti studenti incontrano una certa difficoltà nell’uso del linguaggio scritto. La crescente abitudine a usare mezzi digitali sembra difatti all’origine di una perdita della capacità di produrre i segni e di organizzarli per formare un testo. La ricerca ha voluto verificare se il passaggio dalla scrittura manuale a quella mediata da apparecchiature automatiche non comportasse perdite nella qualità delle operazioni mentali implicate e, di conseguenza, degli apprendimenti.

Nel nostro Paese la questione della formazione degli insegnanti per la scuola secondaria rimane un nodo irrisolto. A questo proposito, questo libro raccoglie una pluralità di voci, provenienti da varie istanze: la pedagogia universitaria, le associazioni professionali dei docenti (Cidi, Mce), il sindacato, la Fondazione Agnelli. Lo scopo non è quello di presentare soluzioni definitive alla formazione dei docenti, bensì quello di offrire una varietà di ipotesi e di interpretazioni, in modo da favorire un approccio critico e razionale al problema.

Reading a mathematical problem can be often challenging for students. To be successful, they need to understand the words, transposing their meaning on an abstract level, to identify the relations stated in the problem and the task requested. Even if the meaning of the words is known, the case can be given that the student cannot grab the global meaning, nor inferring useful implications to solve the problem. This article offers an overview on reading comprehension issues linked to mathematical texts, and then proposes a set of common mistakes made by young readers, emerged in a first exploratory field experience carried out with grade 7 students. Given that learning activities were carried out on the Pythagorean Theorem, specific attention was devoted to the transposition of words into geometrical figures.

It is widely recognized that vocabulary is closely tied to reading comprehension, and correlations between these two constructs, even if differently defined across studies, vary between .6 and .8. But correlation is not a causal relationship, and does not provide enough basis for a comprehensive conceptual explanation. Reversing the problem, it is still highly controversial whether specific interventions on vocabulary instruction can massively influence reading comprehension, and this particularly in adult learners, indicating that a lot remains to be investigated in the field of vocabulary knowledge transfer to other components of language proficiency. Recent studies showed that the weak link for understanding this apparent gap lies probably in the way vocabulary is assessed. This article shows the results of a two-year research project aimed at assessing future teachers’ vocabulary related to school everyday life issues, focussing both on language for specific purposes and on general language. In particular, different typologies of reading comprehension tests, of vocabulary tests (receptive and productive), on paper and pencil and on computer-based administrations, were adopted and compared.