A influência da terceira parte na mudança de footing em chats educacionais

Abstract

This research aims at analyzing what extent and under what circumstances the presence of third part influences or interferes with the educational virtual chats through changes in participants’ footing in these chats and linguistic politeness that they invest in turning points.Our work in this dissertation seeks to achieve this relationship which, in our view, seems inseparable for understanding social relations. Therefore, as the basis of our studies we take Goffman (1967, 1981), Brown; Levinson (1987, 1978), Leech (1983, 2005), and more recently, investigations by Paiva; Rodrigues-Junior (2008), Paiva (2004) and Pereira (2009). To achieve the research’s aims, we had the collaboration of students and teachers from Sociolinguistics, Linguistics and Textual Reading and Production of Academic Texts disciplines, offered in the Portuguese Literature course at the Federal University of Ceará. The participants answered a questionnaire that aimed to understand their habits and affinities with educational virtual chat tools. After crossing and tabling the information provided in the questionnaires and analyzing fifteen chats, we found that the figure of the content teacher does not only act as a third part or zone of influence, but also he/she interferes in some instances to the changing in participants of the interaction’s footing. The most significant type of footing change is in the format of production, in which tutors and students demonstrate that in the presence of the third part, they seek to be more impeller than sponsors or authors. Also, in the presence of the third part, students avoid inserting frames of long duration. Regarding the change of footing for participation structure, the presence of the third part seems to have conditioned the momentary exclusion of the tutor interaction during its presence, which in turn, excluded students, even in this moment of interaction. These results demonstrate that the internal motion to social interactions (footing) held in virtual educational chats is very sensitive to the presence of higher-ranking member, and it can even extend during its absence. With this investigation, we can conclude that the choice of certain politeness strategies, such as use group and identity markers, include listener and speaker in the same activity, nominalize, hold off yourself from the author and add formality, hold off yourself from pronouns such as I and you assist in establishing and changing footings by the participants because they demonstrate the level of engagement undertaken, signaling to which moments the observer interferes with the projection of their faces.