A leitura no foco da avaliação: uma análise da prova de espanhol do ENEM

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how reading is assessed in the Spanish-language questions of the Brazilian National Upper Secondary Education Examination (ENEM), with the aim of identifying the conceptions of reading that underpin the exam and discussing their implications for language education in basic education. Adopting a qualitative and interpretive approach, supported by descriptive quantitative procedures, the study analyzes a corpus of forty questions administered between 2021 and 2024. The analysis was organized around five interdependent analytical axes: genre of the source text, keywords in the item prompt, levels of inference, levels of linguistic analysis, and dimensions of reading mobilized. The results indicate that, despite the diversity of genres, themes, and textual materialities in the source texts, reading practices oriented toward global comprehension and the identification of meaning effects predominate and are strongly delimited by the item prompt. A predominance of low-level inferences mainly anchored in the source text is also observed, as well as a low incidence of operations focused on the systematic analysis of linguistic resources. Based on these findings, it is concluded that, although the Spanish test of the ENEM aligns discursively with the valorization of contextualized reading, its functioning remains marked by the control of interpretation and by the stabilization of responses—features inherent to large-scale assessments—which limits the expansion of interpretive possibilities and tends to restrict the development of a critical stance on the part of the reader. The study contributes to the field of language education and foreign language assessment by proposing na integrated protocol for the analysis of reading items and by providing recent empirical data on the Spanish test, thereby strengthening reflection on its pedagogical and political-curricular effects.