Education of subject-reader: modes of reading advertisements in textbooks

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to introduce a proposal about a reflection on the ways the reading of advertisements is carried out in the textbook Português Linguagens by William Roberto Cereja and Thereza Cochar Magalhães, which is directed to students in the first high school year. Additionally, it analyzes the functionality of these texts in the education of a reader, since reading the ads allows the student to increase the student’s knowledge beyond the purely verbal text, and thus to greatly expand the student’s discursive competence. Besides, advertising is part of the student’s everyday life, it is a kind of text that presents great social movement and therefore, according to the guidelines of the Curriculum Proposal of Santa Catarina and the National Curriculum Parameters, should be part of Portuguese language classes in order to promote an effective reading practice. The analysis is guided by the concepts of Discourse Analysis of French orientation as a framework that brings the historicity of the constitution of the subject, ideology as a determinant in the production of meanings, and reading as the critical moment of the relationship between author-text-reader. Within this perspective of reading as a discursive practice, the reader is seen as enquired by the subject position, so he/she (de) constructs the text read and then adds to it his/her outputs that are not always anticipated by the author. The results showed that the textbook analyzed proposes readings whose meaning is restricted to the immediate context of verbal language, especially one in which the statement provides the evaluation of the standard norm of the language.