Chapter 8
Critical analysis of an educational discourse practice
The literary text commentary
In this chapter, I analyse text commentary as a construction of a discourse genre. As a critical instrument to serve both language and literature teaching, text commentary is a social practice through which political power exerts control over the production of discourses in the area of education. Within this discourse practice, a representative model of the change that took place in Spain in the 1970s is used as an example.
The analysis places the practice of commentary within the ideological practices of power and shows how society shapes a relationship with reality through its discourse about reading and understanding texts. This relationship can be either monological or dialogical. The lack of the latter is an emerging social problem.
Keywords: critical discourse analysis, constructivism, social change discourses, cognitive frame, semiotics, text commentary, reading, understanding, teaching of literature, Spanish teaching of literature, secondary education
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical and methodological framework
- 3.Discourse analysis
- 3.1Reading deficiency and the critical understanding of texts: A social problem
- 3.2The contexts of text commentary
- 3.2.1The socio-cultural context: Educational praxis
- 3.2.2The political context: Text Commentary Institutionalisation
- 3.3Case study: The handbook “How to comment on a literary text,” by Lázaro Carreter and Correa Calderón (1975)
- 4.Interpretation and results
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References