Text for question 53

“I always tried to be decent to the warders in my section; hostility was self-defeating. There was no point in having a permanent enemy among warders.

It was ANC policy to try to educate all people, even our enemies: we believed that all men, even prison service warders, were capable of change, and we did our utmost to try to sway them.

In general we treated the wanders as they treated us. If a man was considered, we were considerate in return. Not all of our warders were ogres. We noticed right from the start that there were some among them who believed in fairness.”

MANDELA, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Bakhtin (1986) understands language as a social and dialogic process in which meaning is constructed through interaction. Within this view, each speech genre is characterized by relatively stable linguistic, compositional, and stylistic structures that emerge from specific social contexts and communicative purposes. Considering the perspective of teaching language contextualized by genres and the structure presented in the excerpt, which proposal is more adequate to an English class: