Values and reading(s)

Abstract

This article is the result of the research project “Values and Reading. Literacy in a Multicultural Society”, directed by Pedro C. Cerrillo y Santiago Yubero and developed in the CEPLI form 2003 to 2005, with the economical support of the Department of Science and Technology of the Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha. One of the aims of this project was to revise the handbooks of Spanish and Literature used in the second cycle of the Primary Education in order to determine the way in which values are presented there through texts and paratexts. For doing that, we made a survey in the schools of Cuenca, Albacete and Toledo. Suite to this survey, we obtained the corpus for the research, which was reduced to the handbooks more used in the three provinces: Anaya, Edelvives, Santillana and SM. This article analyses these manuals. Being a synthesis of a more complex and vaster research, it could seem to be necessarily incomplete and simplifying, but we hope it would result illuminating enough for the reader to have a general idea of the whole research.