This work aims at investigating the process of construction of meaning in oral narratives, in interactive contexts, particularly in the act of shared reading, whereby the adult (in this case, the mother) reads her child a story, as well as the role played by intonation patterns in this construction. Two informants took part in the study, mother and daughter. The corpus is constituted by a narrative event of children s story through shared reading. The use of narrative was chosen because it is a textual genre showing a specific structure which both helps toward widening the reading strategies and toward the construction of the text meaning, and also because narrative is the most conspicuous textual genre in children s stories. The chosen short story was O Pequenino Grão de Areia (The Little Sand Grain) (1998), by Ricardo Filho, published by Paulus. Data were collected during the shared reading, in which the mother told her daughter the Little Sand Grain story. A qualitative analysis of the shared reading activity is conducted, observing the role of intonation in the construction of meaning in reading. Analysis was undertaken on the basis of David Brazil s Intonational Interactive Model (1985), trying to identify the intonation clues given by the adult in reading and its relation to the construction of meaning in this reading. Results show that intonation takes on three textual functions: organizational, informative and interactional, which play a decisive role in the construction of the meaning during the activity of shared reading
