READING PEDAGOGIC DISCOURSE.
Social linguistics features of school teaching practices of reading

Maria de Lourdes Dionísio de Sousa*
(University of Minho, Portugal)

1.
Attitudes, values, habits, practices and knowledge concerning reading aren't learned once for good nor exclusively by means of an individual process of acquiring knowledge about texts and reading. This is the same to say that the meanings one constructs when reading takes place aren't an exclusive product of the reader-text transaction but in a certain sense produced before that transaction. Indeed, "Reading and interpretation may be carried out in solitude, but they are highly social activities, which cannot be separated from the interpersonal and institutional conventions" (Culler, 1980, p. 53) explicitly manifested, for instance, at the educational level. To accept these arguments implies the recognition of the process of becoming a reader as a process that doesn't exist in the independence of the social circumstances. On the contrary, this process is structured mainly by discoursive practices that characterise the communities that share the norms, the assumptions about texts and reading.
Therefore "the study of reading or literacy, ultimately requires the study of social groups and institutions within which one is socialised to interpret certain types of words and certain types of worlds in certain ways" (Gee, 1990, p. 469). Obviously, one of this institutions is School even at primary and intermediate levels. It's here that people are initiated in the ways they must follow to transact with texts.

2.
In order to understand reading practices, motivations and attitudes, even to understand the individual reading process (for instance what kind of mental operations does one do when reading - inside and outside school) - we have to look to reading from several angles, or to use Richard Beach's words: to adopt "multiple stances". This is, "selectively focus on, attend to, or foreground certain features" of, in this case, reading events (1994, p. 1203). One of these stances is the focus on the linguistic features of the communicative situation where the process is acquired. Indeed readers are constituted and produced through discourse. To keep on with Beach, this means adopting as general research strategy a Textual stance : what rules, what roles do subjects learn in the school community through pedagogic protocols that are officially and culturally sanctioned in a specific social context and in a particular historical moment?

2.1.
One of the agents of the particular school community of readers is the school textbook. Functioning as a trustee of the authorised version of the socially valid knowledge and due to some of its features and roles - economic, social and cultural, we have to admit that school textbooks have been, are and will probably be the most important classroom resource in spite of "the variation of educational goals and pedagogic practices, in spite of all the epistemological, ideological and curricular knowledge variation that sometimes give origin to radical changes and curricular re-orientations..." (Olson, 1989, p. 238).
When studies like the "Report card on basal readers" by K. Goodman et al. (1988) conclude that "teachers have internalised the basic promise made by basal materials" or interrogate the teachers' reliance on the textbooks because "it's safe, scientific, lawful, expected and pleasant" one has to hypothesise that this reliance happens because teachers - while in their roles of teachers - belong to this community which structures and at the same time is structured by these materials. Relying on them means the acknowledge of textbooks as one of the most important sources of authority in that particular social group.
Through the school textbook years of tradition, beliefs, values as well as knowledge are conveyed and make intrinsic part of the pedagogic context which textbooks reflect and at the same time serve, to put it as a Norwegian scholar Egil Johnssen does. Due to its "unique and significant social position", textbooks don't represent an "officially sanctioned, authorised version of human knowledge and culture" only "to each generation of students" (cf. De Castell, Luke and Luke, 1989: vii) but also to each generation of teachers and also parents and all the members of that social community that in a way or another act upon the school.
As far as reading is concerned the school textbook represents to all the school community and its environment not only the reading teaching goals and contents but, through the discoursive practices they adopt, also the ways everything must be achieved. What are the adequate skills for students to develop? What is needed to identify relevant aspects in a text? What kind of attitude towards texts and books are desirable and expected? These are some questions we can put to textbooks because, in a certain way, textbooks are "the total reading program" (Chall, 1967: 107).
From this perspective we may say that school textbooks are normative and prescriptive texts since their aims are to assure the acquisition of this particular school knowledge - this is, the rules and codes to adequately interpret texts.
This paper aims to describe some linguistic characteristics of the several discourse devices that ensure the regulative potential of the school textbook and in a way or another constitute kinds of readers and even non-readers.

3.
Several devices inside the textbook work overtly to create conditions to the acquisition of knowledge, rules, values and attitudes concerning reading. These devices can be recovered at the several levels that constitute the discoursive organisation of the textbook.
Usually Portuguese textbooks are organised into units, each one containing a text followed by a body of activities. These activities, although their several forms - questionnaires, guidelines, suggestions, instructions - fulfil the same purpose: to announce, direct, guide and help readers to organise, classify, interpret, evaluate and react to the text. By other words, it is here at this second level that the meanings to be depicted from the text and the way how that must be done are shaped.
Both these two levels - text and activities - are ways of shaping interpretative communities. At first because any selection of texts is neutral nor the discoursive practices that structure the pedagogic reading events can be beforehand detached from the social roles of their producers as well as their ideological and cultural beliefs and values .
When we choose certain texts we are operating what we may call a "selection of culture" and in that way presenting to the group of teachers and learners not only language models but also world models. Through these texts and because of their multiple structuring levels we come to know: what language, what structures, what ideas, what worlds are privileged and found necessary to teach reading.
However, the text is not to be read autonomously but by means of speech acts within a frame of norms and institutional guidelines that are materialised in the second level - the discourse about and around the text. Those speech acts pretend to the organisation of the transaction between readers and texts in order to assure the acquisition of the community valued meanings as it is the case of the following examples:

[1] "As you can see this is a beautiful text. "
[2] "The feast dedicated to life besides being limited in time, is also touched by something unusual and inexplicable."
[3] This texts is about happiness.
[4] In this text there is a comment to the modern way of living.
[5] This text is an example of literary quality.

Being its function to establish and control the social relation between both the actors of the communication and the textual meanings, we call them Discoursive Frames.
These assertions are a subtle strategy at the service of the "selection" not only of what can be asked to a text and what can be said about it, but also at the service of the orientation of how it has to be asked and said.
These frames are usually followed by "elicitations" that - in spite of all constraints imposed by their formal features - more or less directive according to their imperative or interrogative forms - somehow create conditions to the participation of the students in the construction of textual meanings:

[6] What is said about the boy?
[7] What is the most interesting idea of the text?
[8] Give an example of a correct social procedure from the main character.
[9] Transcribe the words of the text that characterise the situation.

These elicitations gives the students/readers an opportunity to have a role in the construction of the textual meanings.
Depending on the degree of control that the sender - the author of the textbook - feels necessary to exert over the receiver, these acts can be more or less regulative organising themselves in a line that goes from a stronger control to a weaker one. From orders to suggestions, from questions to assertions, the school textbook author shows more or less explicitly the degree of knowledge he has about things therefore allowing or not the construction of personal meanings.
In order to reinforce or weakens their original pragmatic values, these assertions, interrogatives and imperatives may be linguistically modified. One of these modifications is the reference to the subjects of the communicative situation by means of the explicit reference to the grammatical person: the I or the YOU. Since the option to explicit or to delete the reference to the speaker/sender or to the hearer/receiver of the message embodies different kinds of relationship between subjects and between them and knowledge we can view them as a discoursive strategy:

[10] This text is about the jungle.
[11] As you have seen this text is about the jungle.
[12] To me, the main theme of this text is ecology.
[13] We think that this author has a deep knowledge about chemistry.
[14] Who do you think is the leader in that group of friends?
[15] Do you agree with me?
[16] What can we say about the author's point of view?
[17] Where in the text is the reference to wild animals?
[18] Do you find any references to wild animals?
[19] What words would you choose to characterise the situation?

These different linguistic options translate the kind of power that the speaker feels to have to state textual meanings and (by the reference to the other) the kind of control he can exert upon the receivers. But as far as interpretation is concerned we also can view this explicit reference to the subjects of the communicative situation as a strategy of involvement in the textual meanings construction process. This means that the absence of any kind of reference to the I and YOU of the communication is a strategy to present meanings as "natural" and "universal" products, the same is to say to present meanings that do not depend from particular subjects, places and times.
Behind these linguistic features which translate the more or less normative and prescriptive nature of the reading process in pedagogic context we can find different understandings of reading teaching and learning: an imposition and acquisition of meanings or a process of construction that imply the co-operation of the students/readers.

4.
An analysis conducted over the total amount of "discoursive frames" and "elicitations" that occur in eighteen language school textbooks for intermediate level revealed the scarce use of explicit references both to the sender and the receiver, the privilege being given to utterances where none of them is visible:

[20] The author of the poem presents a positive view of the town. What are the words that say it?"
[21] The narrator remembers past facts of his family life. Transcribe some of them.

This absence constitutes a discourse mainly characterised by a strong disjunction and exteriority between readers/texts/meanings. At the level of the "discoursive frames" this almost total deletion of the speakers and the hearers from the constructed meanings corresponds as we have said before to a "naturalisation" of textual meanings by which none of the particular readers are responsible, being the speaker the authorised medium.
Even when the discoursive frame contains a judgement of value, as in examples [22] and [23], the voice who speaks is an anonymous one:

[22] This expression constitutes an interesting example of metaphor.
[23] The character is very well characterised.

Therefore, to "be interesting" or "very well characterised" are not values given by a specific reader in possession of specific parameters due to his/her previous knowledge of other texts and the world rather; "be interesting" or "very well characterised" appears here as a shared truth that must be accepted as that because it is not personal and because someone more powerful says so.
In spite of the implicit presence of the receiver in all forms of "elicitations", when it comes to explicitly inscribe at the utterance level the subjects of the communicative situation we concluded for the same scenario: indeed only 6.9% of the seven thousand elicitations we found in these language textbooks explicitly refer the subjects (examples 17 and 20).
Among these 6.9% we find references to the receiver by means of the 2nd person singular and to both sender and receiver by the use of the 1st person plural:

[24] Can you find the words that prove it?
[25] Can we infer that the topic is the ascientificity of racism?

As we can see, in the example [25], the speaker interrogates about a given interpretation which however is not of his/her only responsibility. When the author of the textbooks says WE the receiver becomes a co-constructor of that same meaning. The analysis of elicitations such this one in comparison with all the others where there was only the 2nd person singular confirmed this kind of persuasive strategy through which universal meanings are conveyed as they had been also constructed by the students-readers.
If through the option for the deletion of the subjects we can conclude for the strong frontier established between readers and meanings:

[27] What are the words that create a silent environment?

when we have the expression of the other, either by means of the 2nd person singular or the 1st person plural (examples 25 and 28 to 30):

[28] Quote words or expressions that give you an idea of silence.
[29] Transcribe words or expressions that allow you to locate the action in time and in place.
[30] What kind of lesson can we draw from the poems' reading?

we may say that in these cases a process of identification between readers and texts is established.
The different use of the 2nd person singular and the 1st person plural without an immediate and clear reason for such option lead us to a closer examination of these kind of occurrences. This analysis lead to the conclusion of a differentiation in the kind of interpretative tasks to be done by both senders and receivers. Mental processes as inference, appreciation, evaluation are mostly elicited through utterances in the 1st person plural (examples 25 and 30); on the contrary, when the reference to the student is explicit - 2nd person singular - (examples 28 and 29) the elicited reading processes are mainly at the level of justification of other's interpretations and identification in a frame imposed by the question or order whose linguistic parameters do not allow the student-reader to assume his/her own status of reader. This means that the answers which are elicited do not allow the students to say Me and the text.
But as we have already said the main characteristic of this discoursive context is the deletion or hiding of the speech agents since the majority of the "elicitations" is built with passive sentences:

[31] Identify the expression that can be related with the proverb.

In this last example, because of the use of the imperative form we have a case of an implicit implication of the student-reader in the interpretation. However what happens mostly is the total undetermination of those agents, undetermination through which the elicitation is send to the void either by the use of those passive constructions or similar structures:

[32] How can it be demonstrated that poets also do maths?
[33] What is he going to be in the future?

The speaker's attitude towards the meanings that are asserted or elicited in the textbooks can also be captured through the analysis of the linguistic category "modality" - whose devices show the kind of certainty the speaker has about those meanings:

[34] There are passages with poetic meaning.
[35] There is no doubt that the strange man knew how to captivate the child.
[36] Undoubtedly, this character is going to have a sad life.
[37] There is a very clear difference between the first part of the text and the second one.
[38] It seems that the author likes wild life very much.

Although cases like [35], [36] and [37] - where the speaker asserts his/her certainty about the meanings aren't statistically meaningful -, the strong presence of occurrences like [34] and the scarcity of utterances like [38] - where we have the expression of uncertainty about the interpretation - allow the conclusion that this discoursive context is mostly the place of the certainty of textual meanings. By other words, it seems that meanings pre-exist to readers. What we have with these examples is the expression of episthemic values that in certain circumstances also convey what may call deontic values, this is, some degrees of imposition. However, the explicit prescription of meanings by means of modals such as "must" can't be said to describe this context which as far as this modality is concerned tends to neutrality.
On the contrary, when the sender establishes the conditions for a succeeded interpretation by means of formulas such as:
[39] If you attentively observe … you will notice …
[40] After a quick reading you immediately conclude …
these obligatory values arise almost always.
We also have to say that occurrences like these last two are the only place where the textbook author explicitly determines the way texts must be read.
Although these few cases, the discoursive strategy is the positive assertion built upon positive declarative simple sentences uttered in the 3rd person singular and in the simple present.
Assertions like these, where textual meanings are created as if they were above subjects, times and places configure a discourse where meanings created and imposed as truths by the speaker are predominant.
Because of the different social roles of both author and reader, the aims of these speech acts are wider than those inscribed on their surface; besides stating meanings they are the places where meanings are created to be accepted by the reader as The meaning - the one the reader must acquire and internalize.

5.
These discoursive strategies configure a kind of interaction among authors and readers that seems at first sight a dialogic one. However, at the level of the knowledge the author assumes to have about textual meanings and the way these meanings are displayed, the strong frontier which is created is not very different from the one that exists when nothing is said about senders and receivers and when meanings are asserted in the same way as scientific and natural phenomena, in this way being strongly normative.
If we take into consideration these ways of reading texts, we can conclude that the reader that is being produced is to a great extent a reader-oriented almost only to the perception and identification of superficial textual facts; his only task being to paraphrase, repeat and validate meanings that a voice without face previously created. In these reading practices there are no reads at all.
We also can add that to the deletion of the variables reader and reading also correspond a deletion of the text. Indeed, what seems to be important in the textbook reading is not the text itself but what is said about it.
"This text has meanings and I'm going to tell you what they are" (Fish, 1980) is the teaching strategy where the specificity of each reader and of each act of reading are not valued. Readings are, in this context, "equal" and "parameterd" products as both the "I" and the "you", the author and the reader, must read the same way.

References
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