Nas entrelinhas da notícia: jornal escolar como mediador do ensino-aprendizagem da língua materna

Abstract

This study investigated the strategies of pedagogical mediation and textual production developed in a school newspaper designed as a language activity to be capable of preserving the meaning and function that characterize the social uses of written language. It was developed in the form of an Intervention Research based on the Activity Theory of Leontiev, and on enunciative interactionist conceptions of language and mother tongue teaching. Data analysis laid bare that in cases where the reading strategies and text production were based on the conceptions of the school newspaper as a teaching resource (to be explored subsequent to publication) and writing as transmission of thought or as a means of communication, a normative approach in language teaching predominated, emphasizing content relative to spelling and grammar. This emphasis on the normative dimension has converted reading and textual production in activities whose motives and purposes were their own achievement while teaching activity, distinguishing them from their social functions. On the other hand, the adoption of a declarative interactionist conception of language and of school newspaper as a discursive activity, provided for favorable conditions to the transposition of meaning and functionality characteristics of the social uses of written language to the context of school teaching and learning of reading and textual production. Therefore, the production of the newspaper as meaningful social language activity established both the necessary conditions and reasons for the understanding of the underlying discursive processes and metalinguistic actions for the reading and production of journalistic genres. The analysis of the motives, actions, and operations that configured the production of the newspaper either as teaching resource, or as discursive activity, evidenced the conditions that produce both the artificiality of the teaching-learning processes and the significance and function of written language as a social practice. This knowledge significantly contributes to the understanding of the conditions that must be met for the production and implementation of written language teaching methodologies capable of responding to the key challenges of reader’s formation in the contemporary Brazilian education.