The Comic Strip in the Textbook and Its Interpretive Outlooks: Exploring the Enunciation Space

Abstract

The normative texts governing Brazilian education, such as the Federal Constitution; National Education Guidelines and Bases Law; National Education Plan; Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC); and National Curricular Guidelines, converge on a fundamental point: the student, during their school journey, must go beyond the formal and pragmatic understanding of content and develop the ability to interpret texts. Among these documents, especially the BNCC, establishes as a competency to be developed during basic education that students should be able to identify implicit meanings and the sense effects resulting from certain expressive language uses. In this direction, it is known that the textbook is an instrument that assumes significant importance in promoting the competencies advocated by Brazilian normative documents, contributing indispensably to student development. For this reason, we decided to analyze this didactic instrument and raised the following question: do the exercises related to comic strips in the textbook – from the 3rd year of high school – Portuguese Language provide guidance for interpreting the text's meaning(s)? Based on this research problem, we rely on the following hypotheses: the book prioritizes reading the comic strip as a pretext for exercises on the use of language elements through a predominantly grammatical approach; the exercises proposed by the textbook related to comic strips do not direct the student to interpret the text's meaning(s). Thus, to conduct the analyses and verify the hypotheses, we are theoretically grounded in the Semantics of the Event, proposed by Eduardo Guimarães (2002a, 2002b, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2018), which considers enunciation as the place where studies of meanings should be situated, considering it as a historical and political practice. As a methodology for analysis, we use some concepts specific to the theory used, such as probing, enunciative scene, rewriting, articulation, and, in this direction, this research aimed primarily to investigate and analyze the construction of exercises presented in high school textbooks related to comic strips; recognize possible patterns of exercises and activities proposed by the high school textbook related to comic strips, in order to verify if these exercises encompass what is stated by the BNCC for working with meanings in multisemiotic texts; analyze the semantic functioning of some words present in the corpus texts. In addition, in accordance with these analyses, we also outline a descriptive strategy for conducting a semantic study of the non-verbal text that integrates the comic strip. The results indicate that the exercise composition establishes a relationship between the textbook, the teacher, and the student, where interpretation is subjected to pre-established meanings in the textbook itself.