Portuguese Language Course Books: Authorship And Coercion

Abstract

: This article aims to discuss authorship and the possible coercion involved in the production of High School Portuguese Language course books, by observing and analyzing teachers’ guidelines and their approach as far as visual and verbo-visual texts are concerned. For that matter, two course book series indicated by PNLEM 2009 were chosen. For our work, we picked up a reading activity and six excerpts from the teachers’ guidelines. By confronting the data, we aim to understand how the guidelines found in the official documents that deal with teaching the Portuguese Language in High Schools interfere in the production of books, revealing the coercions in the process. Thus, our discussion is founded on Bakhtin’s and the Circle’s enunciative-discursive theoretical framework, which can help us understand how the conflicts involved in book production can be perceived in the edited books and analyzed from a dialogic perspective. Corpus analysis revealed that the guidelines found in teachers’ books were not always dealt with in the authors’ pedagogical proposal, clearly revealing a conflict between the authorial and official voices and a gap between what is proposed in the teachers’ guidelines and what is actually proposed in the reading activities of visual and verbo-visual texts.