This paper discusses the specificities of the relationship that subjects deeply rooted in a predominantly oral culture establish with the written language. It uses the results of a completed research aimed at retracing the reading/listening public and the different forms of listening to/reading cordel literature between 1930 and 1950 in Pernambuco. It is argued that several factors, mainly reading aloud, intensively and collectively, and the role of memorization, favored by the reading situations and the narrative and formal structure of the very poems, made the relations between both illiterates and semi-literates and the reading of cordel enjoyable and relaxed. Such practices allowed people who, originally, were not very familiar with the reading world to experience literacy practices, that is, to experience situations where they used printed words.
Cordel literature; Literacy; Oral language; Memorization; History of reading