Por entre os(des)caminhos de leitura e produção textual no ensino médio

Abstract

The need for answers to the concerns and the problems experienced during the teaching research period caused current interest in the theme of our dissertation. Actually a lack of relationship between the students and the written language was clearly evident in classroom text productions even in the final school years. Current research analyzed implications with regard to the stance that teachers had in student's written communicative performance. Research has been organized through Interactionism and from the point of view of Applied Linguistics, with the text as the focal point in Portuguese Language teaching, comprising reading, production and reflection. Intertextuality has been pinpointed as the essential coherence condition for the production of texts in the classroom and for the development of communicative competence in the students. Survey has been undertaken in a 3rd grade class of a government high school, during October and November 2004. Cognitive-textual researchetnographic has been adopted since methodological steps have been followed with regard to procedures (Lüdcke & André, 1986). Based on the above principles, thirty text productions were taken as samples and analyzed according to meaning-generating aspects with special reference to coherence factors, such as thematic unity, intertextuality, informatibility and the cognitive schemes triggered in reading. Restructured by the "Geraldian pathway", investigation revealed that productions reproduce certain types of previous knowledge and the marks of reading carried through for the producer establish an intertextual dialogue between the produced texts and world knowledge. However, evidences exist that pedagogical practice is stifled by context and by the social and educational structure and that certain students' bad performance in writing has strict links with the teaching-learning process that had reviously been adopted. In fact, this type of process reveals itself full of faults that impair the students' development of writing. Results show that much has still to be undertaken with regard to the teaching of reading and text production in the high school where the textbook still silences the teacher's voice and becomes the true producer of meaning. Favorable conditions in the teaching-learning of reading and text production in the classroom should be posited and the importance of diversified reading coupled to the constant exercise of text production should be emphasized for the adequate formation of a competent user of the language in all its several registers. The above, nevertheless, depends largely on the teacher's significant and efficacious mediation.