This thesis focuses on a study upon reading proficiency development of Grade 8 students based on literary memories. The research involves qualitative-interpretive, experimental research and applied methods. Likewise, it is on the basis of Bakhtin Circle as well as other scholars who have epistemologically taken the same strand. Concerning to reading practice, it followed the approaches by Britto (2012) and Menegassi (2010; 1995). It is noteworthy that this study was accomplished in partnership with the research project Dialogism on Linguistic Practices from Discursive Genres Approach (UFPA- Castanhal). The research starts from the hypothesis that the implementation of a work with reading activities and under a dialogic bias makes it possible for elementary students to develop their own reading skills. In terms of overall objective, this work mostly pursued to scrutinize the possibilities and consequences of working with literary memory genre regarding Grade 8 students reading proficiency. It comprises the following specific objectives: a) implement an experimental proposal with texts of literary memories, containing stories of the people from Castanhal; b) to verify whether the activities with texts of literary memories told by former residents of Castanhal were effective or not from an analysis of students’s school performance. In order to explore such hypothesis and reach the aforementioned objectives, it was conducted a diagnostic reading in the classroom with the chosen discursive genre aiming to cover students’s comprehension. The diagnosis displayed a higher number of correct answers in the decoding and literal levels, reasonable problems in the inferential level, and a more significant difficulty in the interpretative one. In accordance with the results taken from it, it was proposed an educational intervention, which contains four workshops about this genre and based upon Lopes-Rossi (2008) methodology. Afterward the step in the classroom, it was selected 12 attendees written responses as sampling for the qualitative analysis. Findings provided insights that most of students were able to understand question statements, to find explicit and implicit information in the texts as well as to make inferences, mastering literal and inferential levels of comprehension. Additionally, they also combined the discussed issue with their own background knowledge to produce personal answers, what highlighted their interpretative proficiency. From this progress, students successfully made value judgement on their own, and built up meanings about the approached text. Results underlined that with the implementation of this Educational Reading Project through literary memory genre it was possible to enhance Grade 8 students’s proficiency.
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