In this essay, I intend to present a (re)reading of a recent polemic about the texbook Por uma vida melhor according to the New Literacy Studies (NLS). Literacy, in this perspective, is understood as the social practices situated and sensible to their articulations with the relations of power. I try to support that the negative media repercussions about this book would be related to an idea of reading, writing and orality ideologically linked to the high considered practices of the use of the language and isolated from the social contexts in which these practices are placed. So, in a discussion with the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I analyse these repercussions as the spread of a unique history about this textbook, and I try to propose the reading of this polemic which considers the relation with some literacy social conceptions and privileges a wider concept of the term that would be able to involve the local vernacular practices.
literacy; polemic; textbook