Challenges for an effectively multimodal approach to discursive genres in Portuguese language textbooks

Abstract

The transformations of the Portuguese language textbook throughout the 20th century showed us an influx in terms of the number and quality of visual information. The old booklets had practically only illustrations - at most. Today, the modernization of printing techniques and their cheapness have brought authors and readers the possibility of having lessons not only illustrated, but several other forms of communication: visual, musical and digital. However, regarding the systematic and in-depth exploration of different semioses - specifically the visual one - we note that Portuguese language textbooks still suffer from an insufficient or even wrong treatment of the visual aspect of the genres that appear in the books. This article is the result of a bibliographic research that tried to understand how two didactic collections of Portuguese language used in the city of Uberlândia in Minas Gerais in 2018 approached the visual material, the multimodal genres. In our reflections we count on the notions of language and visual syntax of Dondis (2013), of visual in Kress (2006), of linguistic analysis by Mendonça (2013); of multimodality in Rodrigues (2005), Moura and Rojo (2013), among others, and the history of Portuguese teaching in Bunzen (2011) and Soares (2004). In this article we try to understand which multimodal genres are most used in the analyzed collections and how the authors incorporated visual semiosis into their work. We emphasized in the analysis the importance of illustration in the works, even though it does not, in our opinion, have a noble place. We also analyzed comic strips and advertisements that, together with the illustrations, make up the main visual elements of the analyzed books. Our observations have led us to a worrying conclusion: at least in these collections, there is important work to be done for the effective treatment of multimodality in Portuguese language textbooks. The multimodality of genres in many book activities is treated as something accessory to the construction of meaning and, in some cases, is not even mentioned.