Research in didactic semiotics

an analysis of thesis from the Professional Master's in Language Studies

Abstract

Discursive semiotics, of the French tradition, has proven to be a productive theory in both undergraduate and graduate educational contexts, contributing to the intellectual development of students and enabling more in-depth analyses of various texts. In the field of didactic semiotics studies in basic education, we identified Brazilian research featuring teaching proposals developed within the Professional Master’s Program in Letters (PROFLETRAS). Aiming to understand how discursive semiotics has been employed in this context, we selected six theses from two federal universities, defended between 2016 and 2021, as the corpus for a qualitative study. Our research – grounded in studies on the intersection between semiotics and education – investigated the following aspects: references; objectives; contributions of semiotics; methodological approaches; and the role of semiotics in the didactic proposals. Through our analysis, we observed that the studies presented in the theses investigated to apply various semiotic concepts in their teaching proposals, with some also drawing on references related to reading, text, and genre. Among the results presented, we highlight the application of semiotics in the didactic proposal, which was organized according to the following typology: 1) omission of concepts; 2) dilution of concepts within interpretative approaches; 3) “translation” of concepts; and 4) faithful application of semiotic concepts. These modalities of semiotics in the didactic proposal oscillated between more or less explicit forms of metalanguage, with a tendency toward the latter. We conclude that, alongside the advantages of applied studies, there are challenges regarding the transposition of semiotics in relation to students’ profiles, as the theory was not originally designed for the context of basic education classrooms. Furthermore, the studies still do not provide substantial data on students’ ease or difficulty in understanding the concepts and developing the reading and writing skills targeted in the didactic proposals, since some of these proposals have not been implemented in the classroom.