The construction of narrative in texts produced by students with and without ADHD

Resumo

With this research, we verified the performance of students in the final years of elementary school, divided into two groups:i. subjects with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and ii. with a high level of attention and without this Disorder, comparatively, in their productions of written narrative text, when submitted to the same production conditions. In the context of the text, we analyzed some of the aspects of its construction and organization, such as narrative structure, perception of elements of a source text, universe of reference, thematic unit, textual progression, communicative purpose, informative relevance, and the relationship between texts. Our purpose with this investigation was to compare the performance of these two groups of students, in order to verify possible differences in performance between them and to look for evidence that could explain these differences. Thus, we seek to answer these questions: is there a difference in linguistic performancebetween students with ADHD and students with a high level of attention? Is the linguistic performance of students with ADHD lower than that of students with a high level of attention? To what extent can the attention deficit contribute to theinefficient linguistic performance of people with ADHD? We adopted some methodological procedures linked to quasi-experimental research and linked to the qualitative approach to investigation. Basically, we seek foundations in the literatureon ADHD (BARKLEY, 2008, DUPAUL, George J., STONER, Gary, 2007, DSM-5) and in studies on text and languagepractices (BEAUGRANDE, 1997, ANTUNES 2010, BRONCKART, 1999), and on the proposal of narrative structure foundin Labov and Waletzky (1968) and Labov (1972). The results of this research show that there are differences in theperformance between the groups of informants in the production of written texts. However, the evidence does not supportour initial hypothesis that students with ADHD perform worse than students without the disorder. We found that in someways GCA (control group) performs better than GET (experimental group), but in others GET performs better, and there isalso identical performance in some other aspects analyzed.