Manifestation of reading competence in the Enem: reading procedures and the purposes of the examination

This article aims to analyze the reading procedures identified in the ENEM editions, extracted from four versions of 1998/1999 and 2009/2010. This objective is justified by the projection of the exams in Brazil, both the instruments for measuring the quality of teaching and the function of enrollment in Higher Education. Was held a theoretical review and a 20% analysis of the exams questions of 1998/1999 and 2009/2010 were randomly selected. It is concluded that the recognition of information, inference, activation of prior knowledge, school knowledge, mobilization and calculation of concepts, correlation of information and relation between texts of several semioses are required reading procedures in ENEM. Therefore, it is assumed that a passive reader / candidate identifies and relates the information of a particular text, but does not position itself. It is a descendant model of reading, since the understanding of the questions depends on the cognitive capacity of the reader.