Part of
Developing New Identities in Social Conflicts: Constructivist perspectivesEdited by Esperanza Morales-López and Alan Floyd
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 71] 2017
► pp. 159–180
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.