A metáfora no livro didático: antes e após a avaliação do PNLD

Abstract

This research, as indicated in its title, has analyzed and described how metaphor is approached in textbooks, before and after the advent of the National Textbook Plan (PNLD, in Portuguese). The corpus of this investigation consisted of fragments of four textbooks: two of them were produced before PNLD being created and the other two were evaluated and indicated in the scope of that Program. The objective is to answer the following questions: (i) how metaphorical meanings have been and are being incorporated into textbooks and whether their approach contemplates linguistic and cognitive issues or are unilateral, (ii) if now metaphor is, indeed, understood as a strategy of apprehension and construction of meaning, following the advances of theoretical and methodological studies of Language, (iii) which guidelines a book brings, after PNLD‘s evaluation, to the use of metaphorical effects as a didactic strategy in construction of meaning and understanding of other contents. For that, the metaphor was analyzed as (a) theoretical-methodological update, (b) nature of the approach, (c) dialogue between conceptualization and exemplification, (d) level of reflection on metaphor and metaphorical meanings in study of texts and, (e) use of metaphorical concepts in the understanding of other contents of the Portuguese as a subject at schools. Qualitative research of sociohistorical and discursive orientation was adopted as an epistemological and methodological basis, according to the principles of Bakhtin (1929, 1979). The text, seen as a communicative and interactive event, which is constituted by inferential and multimodal elements (MARCUSCHI, 2002, 2008; DIONÍSIO, 2014), was chosen as a unit of analysis, based on assumptions of PCN. It was observed that there was a theoretical-methodological update of metaphor in the textbook, referring to the way it is being conceptualized and exemplified, as well as to the dialogue between these two actions. It was also observed a gradual use of the interactionist approach, emphasizing the dialogue between cognitive and linguistic aspects of metaphor, instead the purely linguistic and ornamental aspect. However, reflection about construction of meanings and use of metaphorical effects as possibilities for understanding of other contents of the language remain far from what the curricular guidelines for the reading process want. Only one of the two current books analyzed brought that reflection. The other, like the two ancient ones, brings an approach to metaphor, in which the morphological or literary aspects of reading still predominate. In other words, the metaphorical inferences are not explored in the textbook in a socio-discursive level assimilated to what the texts offer, whatmay indicate to different variants. Therefore, the changes observed in approach to metaphor in the textbook are conceptual and methodological andfollow the very complexity of this pedagogical support. Those changes are result from the National Curricular Guidelines and other factors, such as the academic reality of its authors and the production conditions of the textbook itself.