Text production activities in high school textbooks: a discursive practice

Abstract

From a heterogeneous theoretical device, the research work presented in this article comes from our doctoral thesis, aimed to  analyze textbook editions of Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, History, Geography and Portuguese, distributed by the National Book Program for Secondary Education (PNLEM) in 2009 and adopted by three schools in the region of Reconcavo in the state of Bahia, Brazil, to: 1 - describe the written conditions that are provided to high school students; 2 - analyze whether the production activities of written texts contribute to the formation of producers of authentic texts; 3 - provide a list of suggested genres for the production of written texts; and 4 - to identify which concepts and / or theoretical assumptions about language and about text can be inferred from the discursive analysis of written texts production activities. In this article, we present a summary of the analysis of only two of the teaching collections, one of Portuguese and one of Mathematics. The discursive analysis revealed the predominance of the Traditional Educational Discourse on the Portuguese language content (DPT) in the origin and constitution of most production activities of written texts in the textbooks investigated.