O gênero discursivo artigo de opinião em práticas de letramento escolar

Abstract

There is little research which shows argumentative texts being worked in elementary education. Working with literacy practices in a ninth grade class and build a literacy event, in which the opinion article discursive genre was produced by students, shows that the elementary school student knows how to argue and defend his thesis and it show that ability to write argumentative texts must not only be addressed and developed in high school. We work with the concept of literacy based on Street (2014), Soares (2014), Magalhães (2012) Kleiman (1995; 2007; 2008). When we talk about the argument types present in argumentative texts and about argumentation, we rely on Fiorin (2015) Cavalcante (2016) and Gonzaga (2016). It is known that there are difficulties among the elementary school students in building argumentative texts, because this genre requires thesis construction, supported and legitimized by arguments and counterarguments, plus a coherent conclusion. Teachers seek to form the students for meaningful writing, thus the production of the opinion piece is an important vehicle of argumentation, refutation and point of view defense. With the theme School Literacy Practices, we aim, in this work, to bridge the gap between literacy and production of the opinion article discursive genre as a learning tool that teachers of elementary school can use and transmit didactically. We use a qualitative approach (FLICK, 2009) in this study, which was attended by 18 students from the ninth grade of a public school, who worked with the structure of the discursive genre opinion article. After preparation, the students wrote their own opinion pieces in Standard Portuguese language, on the theme "Teenager pregnancy: causes and consequences". The analysis categories of texts produced by students were: a) differentiation of the theme from the thesis; b) development of the thesis; c) argument types. Before the intervention, only 10 students had differentiated the theme from the thesis; after the intervention, 17 had differentiated and developed the thesis. There was the use of various types of argument to defense the central idea of the producers of the texts in the first and last text production. This work contributes to the debate about school literacy through practices of literacy (Street, 2012), since the ultimate goal of the Portuguese language teaching is to enlarge the ability to use reading and writing as social practices.