Reading of multimodal text such as memes: a proposal for a pedagogical resource for teaching Portuguese Language

Multimodal texts are increasingly present in the adolescents and young people reading practices. This is because digital culture progressively reaches this readership. Taking into account that a reading practice goes beyond the act of decoding the linguistic code, because it requires the ability to build meaning from what was read, the aim of this study is to demonstrate that the use of multimodal texts of the meme type can serve as a productive tool for teaching Portuguese in classes, particularly for high school students. The relevance of this work is effected by the comprehensive production of memes in virtual interaction environments, in which young people, in general, is on a daily basis. The corpus is made up of texts extracted from a Twitter page entitled Memes inuteis para salva sua vida inutil (sic), which reaches an audience of at least 1.3 million people. The study is based on theoretical assumptions about textual genres and multimodal texts, based on studies' Marcuschi (2008), Abrahao (2018), Lima et al. (2021) Pavanelli-Zubler, Ayres and Souza (2017), Pereira and Pereira (2020), Gomes, Semechechem and Cardoso (2020), Deusara, Arantes and Muylaert (2021), among others. The study is carried on a qualitative nature, is supported by a functionalist frame of reference and is configured as exploratory research. The main results showed that multimodal texts memes constitute a productive tool to be used as a pedagogical resource for Portuguese Language classes, that allow to work on several aspects of linguistic uses, among which stand out: the construction/production of meaning and humor effect, referencing, verb-nominal agreement and linguistic variation.