Uma proposta de descrição do gênero meme na perspectiva da semiótica social: caminhos para aplicação no ensino de leitura e escrita

Abstract

This research aims to describe the constituent elements of the meme, verifying which are more relevant at the moment of production, in addition to analyzing the space of this discursive genre in teaching. For this, an activity was applied to students in the fourth period of the Language course at the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, in which the genre meme was approached in its characteristics and also produced by the students. In addition, students answered two questionnaires, one at the beginning and one at the end of the activity, in order to verify which elements they point out as most important at the moment of production, as well as their choices of recursion and intentionality. To this end, the research was based on technology concepts pointed out by authors such as Veraszto (2008), Lévy (1998) and Pinto (2005), as well as contributions from discursive genres and teaching of writing, reading and multiliteracies based on contributions by Kleiman (2012), Rojo (2017), among others. For the conception of gender, the social semiotic approach proposed by Landowski (2014), Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) and Halliday and Hasan (1989) was chosen. About memes, it was based on Milner (2016), Shifman (2013) and Recuero (2007) to propose a description of the genre. Concerning the analysis of memes produced by the informants, the Grammar of Visual Design by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) was used, based on the representational, interactive and compositional metafunctions. The research has a qualitative and exploratory character, since the purpose was not just to quantify data, but to analyze the choices of verbal and non-verbal elements used when producing memes. At the end of the research, after analyzing the questionnaires and memes produced, it was found that, after mental planning on the topic, the author of a meme with a fixed image and subtitle will choose the image and then create the verbal text. Thus, the non-verbal element will direct writing, which can help in understanding about the knowledge and mechanisms necessary for a meme to be produced, opening paths for work proposals with this discursive genre in school.