Multimodal genres in textbooks: are students being schooled for visual literacy?

In this paper, we discuss some issues involved in teaching and learning reading, especially schooling in visual literacy. We seek to observe the work developed with genres that combine verbal and visual languages, found in the reading activities of two high school textbook series for Portuguese la...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Cláudia Graziano Paes de Barros, Elizangela Patrícia Moreira da Costa
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo 2012-11-01
Series:Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso
Subjects:
Online Access:http://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/bakhtiniana/article/view/10605/9324
Description
Summary:In this paper, we discuss some issues involved in teaching and learning reading, especially schooling in visual literacy. We seek to observe the work developed with genres that combine verbal and visual languages, found in the reading activities of two high school textbook series for Portuguese language teaching. Our goal was to understand to what extent these activities contribute towards the development of reading skills needed to deal with the specificities of these genres. Therefore, we used the enunciative and discursive assumptions of the socio-historical approach of Bakhtin Circle, as well as the Social Semiotics perspective to understand multimodality. Data analysis revealed that the incidence of multimodal genres studied in the two textbook series is hardly representative. The didactic treatment these genres receive in reading activities does not favor the mobilization of specific reading skills and contributes little to students‟ visual literacy schooling.
ISSN:2176-4573