Letramentos acadêmicos em situação de ensino e aprendizagem de Português Língua Adicional

Abstract

This thesis is part of Applied Linguistics, with emphasis on teaching and learning Portuguese as an Additional Language (PLA). Our study goal is the expansion of the academic literacy of foreign students pursuing a Master of Arts and Doctorate degrees at the Federal University of Ceará. They are participants of the Portuguese as a Foreign Language: Brazilian language and culture course. In this context, recent researches indicate challenges faced by foreign students in Brazil (SILVA, 2015, among others) regarding the use of the Portuguese language for communication, and mainly in academic activities. They enter university to pursue their masters or doctorate degree, but most of the time, they cannot communicate in Portuguese, especially through written academic texts. Therefore, our main objective is to describe and analyze text productions of the biodata genre and the oral communication summary made by foreign undergraduate and graduate students in the context of teaching and learning of Portuguese as an Additional Language. The focus is on the social dimension, combined with a linguistic dimension in the text organization that contributes to the expansion of academic literacy through mediation, from a language sociointeractionist perspective. For this, we used the Sociodiscursive Interactionism as a theoretical contribution, especially from Bronckart (2012, 2008, 2016) postulates. For him, language activities are directly associated with general social activities. These activities engender the textual genres that are confirmed in empirical texts. For the analysis, we start from the descending approach of text analysis as advocated by Volóchinov (2018) which considers the concrete conditions of verbal interaction, the forms of enunciation and finally the forms of language. Bronckart (2012) proposes a text analysis model that he calls textual architecture. Within this architecture, we highlight the elements of textualization, especially cohesion and connection. These categories are responsible for the maintenance and thematic progression of the texts. For this, we consider the contribution of Adam (2011) in the understanding of this category of analysis to be important, stating that the elements of cohesion play an important role at both the local and global levels, contributing to the construction of the text as a communicative unit. We also use the text theory for treating the text under an approach that integrates the social and psychological, praxeological and gnosiological dimensions (COUTINHO, 2012). We establish, as proposed by Bronckart (2012), a relationship with the context of production (BRONCKART, 2012; BRONCKART; MACHADO, 2009). We made a link between learning the linguistic elements responsible for cohesion and the connection to the development of academic literacy. In this context, we used the studies of Lea and Street (1984) to address academic literacy. To account for our object of study based on these theoretical assumptions, we used action research as a methodology (THIOLENT, 2011) since we understand that, for our project, the researcher will also act directly in teaching and learning activities. As a teaching and learning methodology, we developed a literacy project which leads to several actions. These actions are important to understand how students can use language in situated social practices, that is, how they can produce texts within academic activities. Regarding the confrontation of the problems perceived during the research, we will resort to the proposal of didactic sequences (SCHNEUWLY; DOLZ, 2004) as a device that treats gender as a mega instrument for language teaching and learning. With this device, we will emphasize written text as a writing and rewriting process. To address this didactic engineering, we adapted the didactic proposal of teaching reading according to Leurquin (2015), to a text production teaching didactics, highlighting the academic genres as part of the literacy project. Thus, we established a threefold relationship between academic activities, reading and production of texts of academic genres and the learning of linguistic units responsible for the organizational dimension of the text, intending to broaden the academic literacy of these students. The analyses of the texts show that the mobilization of linguistic resources by the students, along with the writing process encompassing the rewriting, implies the configuration of the genre, especially the social dimensions – mobilized social role and the organizational dimension. In addition, students' difficulties do not only concern the use of Portuguese language resources but, above all, knowledge of various kinds, such as cognitive, social and linguistic. Thus, we consider that these dimensions of biodata text genres and oral communication summary are relevant in the teaching and learning process, giving students possibilities to interact in the academic community in which they are temporarily situated, assuming the Portuguese language as a communicative resource.