This paper proposes the concept of frameworks for meaning construction in written texts, related to the dimensions of people’s experiences expressed in lexical-grammatical text structure: genre, register, field, tenor and modality. These frameworks are observed in the analysis of a dissertative-argumentative text which does not correspond to any of the expected frameworks for the type of text required. The same text is presented to 80 High School students, and their comments reveal the level of quality of their metalinguistic knowledge: an understanding of language which is limited to the word level; the perception of register, but not of other frameworks; the limitation to linear-superficial text aspects: orthography, punctuation etc., and the textual perspective as object-language, and not metalanguage. From these facts, we proceed to some claims about the current conditions of the teaching and learning of Brazilian students’ mother tongue in Brazil by taking into consideration the knowledge that they have been constructing about language.
Discursive and textual genres; Metalinguistic development; Language teaching-learning; Text production