A leitura crítica a partir da interpretação de charges jornalísticas

Abstract

This research paper aims to evaluate senior students of the Brazilian public high school system in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil as far as their critical reading comprehension of newspaper cartoons are concerned. The corpus of the paper is composed of the student-readers’ analysis of two cartoons. My reflection of their analysis was based upon the relationship between the verbal and non-verbal semiotic elements in the constitution of the subjects’ critical point of view. Since I assumed that their critical analysis depended on their knowledge of the world, which is a result of their social practices, I chose to investigate the origin of this knowledge as well. My hypotheses were that the critical readers would form their opinions through the development of a thesis and through the creation of supporting arguments. I also took into account that the pictures in the cartoon would present themselves as strong, expressive resources that would influence the creation of the theses and their likely supporting arguments as far as the influences exercised by the interrelations are concerned. I believed that the media would be the most influential aspect. Therefore, the research, which was oriented by a Bakhtinian perspective on language and founded on Carraher’s research about critical thinking and on Charraudeau’s semiolinguistic analysis, aimed to reflect upon the language act played by the subjects called producer/interlocutor (EUe/EUc) and reader/interlocutor (TUd/TUi), through which the argumentative device is designed, composed of three elements – proposal, proposition, and persuasion. The results allowed me to come to the conclusion that the nonverbal language plays an important role in the process of critical meaning in the cartoons and it subsidizes the critical interpretation of the readers. The research has also confirmed a) the hypothesis that the more perceptive readers would make a critical analysis of the cartoons through the development of a thesis supported by arguments; b) the strong influence of the media in the constitution of the knowledge of the world of the readers. The data analysis also allowed me to draw the conclusion that the reading of cartoons represents an opportunity for the reader, as an autonomous individual, to interpret the ideologies that are underneath the discourses within our sociocultural daily life. Therefore, the pedagogical implications of this research are to confirm the relevance of the insertion of newspaper cartoons as a genre to be used in classroom reading materials in order to form critical readers.