MultimodaL Retextualization: Essays with High School Students

Abstract

The production of texts in school has always been characterized as a complex activity, having in mind the demand to contemplate the social uses of language and of multiliteracies. Due to this difficulty, unfortunately, what we see is a teaching of writing that is neither systemic nor progressive, a teaching approach that does not mobilize the abilities that involve the competence to write and does not explore the diverse languages and semiosis that are at our disposal in contemporaneity. The essay the students have to write for ENEM reinforces the production of texts that explore only verbal language. Having this context in mind, this paper provides a discussion and analysis of the multimodal retextualization procedure in order to verify how high school students retextualize a predominantly verbal text in multimodal texts. Finally, we note the importance of taking activities that mobilize other types of languages beyond the verbal text into the classroom and the possibility of merging these activities with the demand made by the students, in this case, the ENEM essay.