READING AND MULTIMODALITY IN THE PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK: A LOOK UPON ACTIVITIES WITH THE COMIC STRIP GENRE

Abstract

This work aims to analyze reading activities with the comic strip genre in the Portuguese language textbook from the perspective of multimodality. To do so, we used the textbook Português: Linguagens from the 8th year of Elementary School as our research object. Specifically, we sought to describe the reading activities with the discursive genre comic strip present in the textbook and understand the activities from the textbook in terms of their ability to develop reading skills for multimodal texts. The methodology used is supported by a qualitative approach, through descriptive and interpretive research. When performing the descriptions and analyses, we noticed that thirty activities use the comic strip genre as a motivating text for the proposition of questions to be answered. From the analysis, we inferred four purposes of these activities: discuss the theme of the chapter; promote the reading of the text based on the content worked in class; work on linguistic-grammatical aspects, multimodality, and world knowledge; and analyze and identify grammatical and formal aspects of language. Therefore, although multimodality is approached in some situations, we did not find activities with the comic strip genre that focused only on multimodality, being treated in few questions, which revealed the need to rethink these activities to promote a reading practice consistent to what is expected for Portuguese language teaching.