Analyzing a test as genre: Critical Genre Analysis of the English language ENEM

Abstract

This paper proposes a Critical Genre Analysis (CGA) (Motta-Roth, 2006; 2008a; 2008b) of the English Language test on the Brazilian National High School Exam (EL-ENEM), to, ultimately, discuss the language conception that underlies this test. The corpus of the analysis was composed of eight samples of the EL-ENEM genre. The results point out that EL-ENEM items provide the test takers with a contextualization about their reference texts. This contextualization, in most items, provide information regarding the genres of the reference texts. The items, then, demand the test takers to identify different types of information in the reference texts. The types of information that are demanded the most refer to the text’s content, objective, and topic. This way, the test takers must activate knowledge related to Semantics and Pragmatics, Register (context of situation) and Genre (context of culture), indicating a direction to the view of language as genre, adopted by the official documents that guide ENEM’s design.