Fóruns educacionais em EAD: considerações sobre o desvio do tópico discursivo

Abstract

This article will demonstrate how the discursive topic is developed in forums of distance education and how there is a shift in its topic, a fairly common phenomenon in this genre. To achieve this purpose, we are based on Brown and Yule (1983), Jubran et al (1992) and Pinheiro’s (2006) concept of discursive topic. In addition, we are also based on Koch (2004), whose approach is about the topic detour. For this, we collected eight posts of two educational forums on UFC course of Languages, with examples that show empirically the existence of the topic detour. The results indicate at least four types of detour: focus on a subtopic of the central topic, introduction of a new topic, metatextual posts and use of gender forum for other purposes.