This research, as indicated in its title, has analyzed and described how
metaphor is approached in textbooks, before and after the advent of the National
Textbook Plan (PNLD, in Portuguese). The corpus of this investigation consisted of
fragments of four textbooks: two of them were produced before PNLD being created
and the other two were evaluated and indicated in the scope of that Program. The
objective is to answer the following questions: (i) how metaphorical meanings have
been and are being incorporated into textbooks and whether their approach
contemplates linguistic and cognitive issues or are unilateral, (ii) if now metaphor is,
indeed, understood as a strategy of apprehension and construction of meaning,
following the advances of theoretical and methodological studies of Language, (iii)
which guidelines a book brings, after PNLD‘s evaluation, to the use of metaphorical
effects as a didactic strategy in construction of meaning and understanding of other
contents. For that, the metaphor was analyzed as (a) theoretical-methodological
update, (b) nature of the approach, (c) dialogue between conceptualization and
exemplification, (d) level of reflection on metaphor and metaphorical meanings in
study of texts and, (e) use of metaphorical concepts in the understanding of other
contents of the Portuguese as a subject at schools. Qualitative research of sociohistorical
and discursive orientation was adopted as an epistemological and
methodological basis, according to the principles of Bakhtin (1929, 1979). The text,
seen as a communicative and interactive event, which is constituted by inferential
and multimodal elements (MARCUSCHI, 2002, 2008; DIONÍSIO, 2014), was chosen
as a unit of analysis, based on assumptions of PCN. It was observed that there was a
theoretical-methodological update of metaphor in the textbook, referring to the way it
is being conceptualized and exemplified, as well as to the dialogue between these
two actions. It was also observed a gradual use of the interactionist approach,
emphasizing the dialogue between cognitive and linguistic aspects of metaphor,
instead the purely linguistic and ornamental aspect. However, reflection about
construction of meanings and use of metaphorical effects as possibilities for
understanding of other contents of the language remain far from what the curricular
guidelines for the reading process want. Only one of the two current books analyzed
brought that reflection. The other, like the two ancient ones, brings an approach to
metaphor, in which the morphological or literary aspects of reading still predominate.
In other words, the metaphorical inferences are not explored in the textbook in a
socio-discursive level assimilated to what the texts offer, whatmay indicate to
different variants. Therefore, the changes observed in approach to metaphor in the
textbook are conceptual and methodological andfollow the very complexity of this
pedagogical support. Those changes are result from the National Curricular
Guidelines and other factors, such as the academic reality of its authors and the
production conditions of the textbook itself.
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