Within the framework of Lakoff and Johnson´s Theory of Conceptual Metaphor, this thesis identifies and analyzes metaphors for reading comprehension and interpretation occurring in five widely adopted collections of Brazilian Portuguese textbooks. The work sets out from the following hypotheses: (a) linguistic metaphors employed in these textbooks around the notions of reading comprehension and interpretation provide valuable clues as to the underlying language conception followed by the authors; and (b) these textbooks still take language for granted as an unproblematic means of communication, capable of working in a transparent and homogeneous manner, as a clear uniform a-historic system that is semantically autonomous and abstracts users and contexts. According to the theoretical framework adopted, the work identifies and analyzes structural, orientational and ontological metaphors which have as their target-domain the notions of text, meaning, and reading. The analyzed data include textbook prefaces, on the one hand, and reading comprehension and interpretation activities, on the other. The results of this research bear out its initial hypotheses, and point to a mismatch between the conception of language suggested or made explicit in the prefaces and that occurring in the textbooks´ proposed activities.