A new direction and approach

A new direction and approach on reading and writing is to do it in large groups. This shows a processes and practices have the purpose to make it possible for the reader and writer to colonize their culture intellectually and develop in themselves the ability to see  knowledge as fields that can be reconfigured and which require a flexible subject, able to assimilate the permanently changing structures. Consequently, we can say that reading and writing have become, in the contemporaneous world, a task that requires more liberty, more competence, because the world and, implicitly, knowledge, are less linear, but wider and more intricate.

The fields of reading and writing have been extended, so that now we can read texts related to different areas – these are discourses, understood as texts about everything around us that makes sense and can be communicated in various ways. The discourse is a paradigm of significates with which we build, name and perceive the material and spiritual world. On the other hand, Casamiglia and Tusón (1999) state that talking about discourse means, above all things, talking about a social practice that starts from a contextualized use of language, either oral or written. Therefore, the discourse is part of the social life and sometimes is in itself an instrument that creates social life.

Van Dijk (1996) tries to explain the concept, identifying the three main dimensions of the discourse: the use of language, the communication of beliefs (cognition) and the interaction of social characters. Basically, one could say that a discourse is language at work. It is an individual, but also a social process. Discourse doesn’t appear only when somebody speaks or writes, but there is a discourse in all human activities. There is a discourse before the first word is uttered. Discourse is not just an instrument of language, but it is also a generator of knowledge and of meaning. The text is a concrete form of discourse, or we can say that a discourse is a text put in context.