This study investigates the potential benefits of reading strategy instruction in the English classroom in an L2 learner context. We examined the effects of reading strategy instruction on reading comprehension for L2 learners and investigated howreading strategies should be taught in the context of Swedish upper secondary school. To this end, six empirical studies were evaluated. We found that reading strategy instruction had a positive impact on reading comprehension in general, but that it was especially effective for certain student groups. Namely, intermediate learners benefitted more than other groups, while the weakest students improved the least in response to instruction. Furthermore, the research we examined suggests that it may be advantageous to focus on teaching a single strategy at a time. However, it is important to eventually expand students’ range ofstrategies long-term, since many pupils tend to over-rely on problem-solving strategies to the detriment of their progress in reading. Thus, emphasizing the less frequently used support strategies during instruction may help students read moreefficiently. Additionally, for reading strategies to best benefit learners, they should be taught in a clear, step-by-step manner. Finally, we argue that using aspects of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory to inform lesson plans would greatly benefit students, especially those who are less proficient. Due to the lack of research in the increasingly heterogeneous Western world, future research should investigate how reading strategy instruction behaves in a multicultural context in the West.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This study aims at investigating how authors of Portuguese for foreigners textbooks work with the reading ability in relation to the use of the bottom-up strategies. In order to verify how the relation between reading ability and linguistic competence works, I have decided to analyze the reading sections of four Portuguese for foreigners textbooks that are been used nowadays and which contains the teacher s book. First of all and within this context, the methodology of data analysis was based on Leontiev s version of Activity Theory (1977), for the purpose of identifying what actions are developed by the student during the activity of learning Portuguese and checking whether these actions may become operations. Secondly, it was found theoretical support in Richter s Holistic Model (2004, 2005) as a way to describe the reading tasks of those textbooks and elaborate a model of a standard class. This model which was based on an interactive reading teaching and applied to a complex spiral vision, was compared to the corpus of this study, to verify what material would be closer to the ideal one for internalization of specific formal items. The study theoretical support was centered in the following aspects: textbook as a genre; Vygotsky s social-interactionist teaching, emphasizing key-concepts as mediation, internalization and zone of proximal development; Activity Theory, textbook according to Activity Theory; reading and cognition and reading models. The results suggest a tendency of the authors of the analyzed corpus to consider the bottom-up strategies as irrelevant ones for the student to construct the meaning of the text. / Este trabalho tem como objetivo investigar como autores de livros didáticos de português para estrangeiros trabalham a habilidade de leitura no que se refere ao uso das estratégias bottom-up. A fim de verificar como se dá a relação entre habilidade de leitura e competência lingüística, escolhi analisar as seções de leitura de quatro livros didáticos de Português para estrangeiros que possuem livros do professor e estão sendo usados atualmente em sala de aula. Nesse contexto, a metodologia de análise dos dados foi pautada, primeiramente, na Teoria da Atividade na versão de Leontiev (1977), procurando identificar quais são as ações desenvolvidas pelo aluno durante a atividade de aprender Português e se essas ações podem vir a se transformar em operações. Em um segundo momento, buscou-se sedimentação teórica no Modelo Holístico de Richter (2004, 2005), como forma de descrever as tarefas de leitura dos livros e de elaborar um modelo de aula padrão. Esse modelo, embasado a favor de um ensino de leitura interativo, aplicado a uma visão em espiral de complexidade, foi cotejado com o corpus deste estudo, no intuito de verificar qual material estaria mais próximo do ideal para a internalização de itens formais específicos. A fundamentação teórica foi centrada nos seguintes aspectos: livro didático visto como um gênero textual; ensino sócio-interacionista de Vygotsky, ressaltando conceitos-chave como mediação, internalização e zona de desenvolvimento proximal; Teoria da Atividade, livro didático segundo a Teoria da Atividade; leitura, cognição e modelos de leitura. Os resultados obtidos sugerem uma tendência dos autores do corpus analisado a considerar as estratégias bottomup irrelevantes para que o aluno construa o significado do texto.