Writing abstracts in higher education: types of discourse

Submitted by: Carla Teixeira
Abstract: Courses on academic writing have become more frequent in higher education to face the challenges of communication on a specific social domain with which students have little or no previous contact. This study analyses a corpus of abstracts produced by undergraduates attending a course on Portuguese Academic Writing in a higher education institution (Cardoso, Sebastião & Teixeira 2018).
We adopt the Socio-Discursive Interactionism (SDI) framework, which considers that there is an intrinsic dynamics to each social activity and each text genres has relevant linguistics markers (Bronckart 2008; Dolz, Noverraz, Schneuwly 2001). Special highlight will be given to types of discourse as packages of linguistics units based on mind operations: temporal disjunction or conjunction and enunciative implication or autonomy. Thus it is our aim to demonstrate how socio-discursive analysis tools describe student’s performance on Portuguese Academic Writing.
According to data, students progressively acquire some skills more easily than others, especially those related to macrostructure as text plan; however, acquiring the specificities of theoretical discourse, a type of discourse featured by the temporal conjunction in the present and the enunciative autonomy, demands a special effort.

Keywords: Portuguese Academic Writing; abstract; scientific article; Socio-Discursive Interactionism; textual architecture; types of discourse.

References
Bronckart, J.-P. (2008). Genre de textes, types de discours et “degrés” de langue. In Texto! Janeiro, vol. XIII (1). Disponível em: <http://www.revue-texto.net/index.php?id=86>. Acesso em 20 jun. 2013.

Cardoso, A.; Sebastião, I.; Teixeira, C. (2018). O resumo de artigo científico: exemplo de um percurso didático em escrita académica. In E. Leurquin, Osório, P. Coelho & M. C. Coelho, Lugar da gramática na aula de Português. Editora Dialogarts, pp. 126-147

Dolz, Joaquim; Noverraz, Michele; Schneuwly, Bernard (2001). S’exprimer en français: Séquences didactiques pour l’oral et l’écrit (vol. I- III). Bruxelles: De Boeck & Larcier.