Reading with magnifying glass: frame semantics and the formation of the critical reader

Abstract

The formation of critical readers is a process that has been gaining prominence in the context of the teaching-learning process in schools, especially when facing the new challenges inherent to new digital media. The appropriation of reading mobilizes several cognitive actions, in the sense of consciously reflecting on what is in between the lines, the relationships and the more or less implicit meanings. In this process of training educating critical readers in times of the emergence of (dis)information technologies, this study aims to answer the following question: how can frame semantics contribute to form critical readers? In this article, we seek to analyze how the discursive-argumentative alignment occurs so that a community institution of higher education in Rio Grande do Sul consolidates and strengthens a socially constructed identity. In order to so, news related to the practice of extension practice published by this educational institution on its internet page was analyzed in order to exemplify the argumentative composition of this text, to observe how the lexical choices lead to meanings that are intended in the text, in order to guide the discursive units that influence the reading comprehension. This type of analysis, a kind of reading with a magnifying glass, emerges as a strategy to take a detailed look, giving rise to a critical reading of the texts, making it possible to catch what is said and what is unsaid in the discursive alignment.