O humor na tirinha “Hagar, o horrível”: uma análise multimodal

Abstract

Reading is a fundamental activity for the individual in process of schooling and learning. That is why discussions regarding cognitive strategies and necessary abilities to understand and interpret, allowing the reader to notice and build meanings from the text, are being claimed by society, especially given the lack of reading competency by the students in Brazilian schools, including the final years at Elementary School. This reality shows in the results of the two Diagnostic Activities (corpus 1) applied in a Year 9 class at E. E. Francisco Lopes da Silva. We verified that the pedagogical work with language hybridity was incipient in the context of the classroom, keeping in mind that, for most of the class, the reading strategies focused only in the verbal, with imagination remaining in the field of props and illustrations. Furthermore, the students were not armed with enough knowledge to understand the humour effect in the cartoon/comic strip type. Therefore, we started asking the following questions: does the issue happen due to the lack of knowledge regarding the strategies involved in composing cartoons/comic strips? Is it sufficient to train questions relative to this type, not paying attention to the way it is built? Thus, this work focuses on the general objective of seeking to develop and apply activities of intervention, handing out strategies so the student has enough subsidies to understand cartoons/comic strips, especially “Hagar the Horrible’. Considering the hypothesis that the difficulty in understanding the humour in cartoons/comic strips is not a result of apathy or disinterest from the students, but of superficial methodology in the study of this particular type of text, we based ourselves on the theoretical support of the Systemic-Fundamental Linguistics, following Halliday (2004), and of the Multimodality Theory, according to Kress and van Leeuwen (2006). The undertaken research is justified by the school needing to work with texts of different linguistics types, in which the student can identify a verbal-visual language. Anchored on a literacy multimodal and critical approach, we put in practice an Intervention Plan (corpus 2), opening up to the student a new concept of text, wider and multisemiotic. Under this angle, with the goal of developing a profitable work regarding the composition of cartoons/comic strips, we used the Didactic Sequence, based on an adaptation proposed by Dolzet al. (2004). In this case, through a systematic plan, the methodology employed guided the formulation of five modules, divided into ten units, with continuable and relatable actions, combining theory to practice (Protocoled Pause and Interpreting Activities). In corpus 3, we applied two Post-Intervention Activities, whose systemized data adduced validity to the multimodal texts and the importance of knowing the components of the humoristic speech. Therefore, the developments of our research, mainly as a result of the interventions, when the performance of the students jumped from 20.5 to 76.4, proved the importance of teaching Portuguese with focus on the language being used, incorporated to a situational and cultural context.