The purpose of this study is to point out the reading views and the concepts underlying the second language teaching and learning process at regular schools, according to official documents which have been developed to guide the teaching practice, such as: the National Curriculum Parameters (1998), São Paulo's Curriculum Proposal, concerning the teaching of Modern Languages (MEC/SEE, 2008 a), as well as the manual addressed to high school English teachers (SEE, 2008 b). In order to achieve our purpose, after going through different reading views, based on Coracini's (1995, 2000, 2001) and Leffa's (1996) studies, some excerpts of the documents were revisited, so that we could observe how the pedagogical orientations are discursively designed and whether they are coherent with the theory that the material analyzed claims to adopt. Finally, this paper aims at thinking about the effects of some concepts, such as: reading, subject and language concepts upon the education of second language readers. From the theoretical point of view, the current study is based on the discursive perspective.
second language reading; official documents; discursive perspective