The argumentative writing: the curricula, the textbook and the teacher – a classroom interaction
Submitted by:
Isabel Sebastião
Abstract:
The argumentative writing: the curricula, the textbook and the teacher – a classroom interaction
Throughout their school career, in their profession of student, students relate to different genres. The genre system (Bazerman, 2006), which students deal with on a daily basis in school, is regulated by the curricular guidelines governing teaching and thus delimits a course of learning (PMCPEB, 2015) and transmits to the student by the teacher and by the textbook, the instrument of education that has more weight in the process of teaching and learning and in current societies (Sebastião, 2013): the textbook - as an instrument of action that constitutes an integral part of the Portuguese education system with the tools it provides the student.
This situation leads to the following question: does the elaboration of the textbooks, subjugated to the programmatic indications, take into account the textual and discursive theoretical characteristics necessary for the knowledge of the genres of the order of argumentation? As Costa (2016: 175) states, "students must have textual competences such as text-model awareness and linguistic resources as causal, conditional, and contrastive links" so that they can be proficient at the moment of mastery of writing. Therefore, beyond the linguistic aspects, the process of teaching and learning of the production of written texts must take into account the conditions of their production, emphasize their communicative linguistic purpose; take into account the specificities (textual and discursive) of the requested genre; identify the preferred places of circulation and define their interlocutor (van Dijk, 2008).
In this way, this presentation of a case study intends to perceive the relationship that exists between the theory expressed by the programmatic guidelines, for the domain of argumentative writing, and the practice to which the students of the 9th grade are submitted to through the Portuguese textbook. To understand better this relation, in this presentation we will also analyze the performance of the teacher, real interaction in the classroom, in the mediation between the student and the textbook. The analysis perspective assumes a qualitative method, compare the curricular guidelines, the textbook used in this specific context classroom and the teacher’s performance.
Among some of the results obtained up until now and which are intended to be presented for discussion, one can anticipate that the pragmatic-discursive questions underlying the textual typologies and the textual and discursive genres under study are incomplete.
Keywords: teaching and learning of writing, textbook, argumentative writing, argumentative genre.
References
Bazerman, C. (2006). Gêneros, agência e escrita. São Paulo: Cortez.
Costa, A. L. (2015). “No limiar da escrita argumentativa: um estudo exploratório”. Revista da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, 2, pp. 173-203.
https://doi.org/10.21747/ 2183-9077/rapl2a8
DGE (2015). Programa e metas curriculares de Português do ensino básico. Lisboa: DGE/MEC.
Sebastião, I. (2013). Interactividade entre práticas e aprendizagens de estruturas discursivo textuais no ensino básico - o discurso epistolar. Tese de Doutoramento, Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
van Dijk, T. (2008). Discourse and Context. Cambridge: University Press Cambridge.