O ensino da argumentação: uma experiência didática com o artigo de opinião no curso de letras

Abstract

This dissertation reports a didactic experience aimed at teaching argumentation among Language Course students from the first level at UNEAL (Universidade Estadual de Alagoas). The relevance of the work is due to the effort of trying to remedy the recognized textual-discursive deficit of newcomers students to the university, especially in relation to formal and argumentative written texts. This failure brings preoccupation because the teaching formation course in Languages aims at training professionals to teach the mother tongue and foreign languages at regular schools. The work is characterized as a collaborative action research, assuming the aspect of a didactic-pedagogic intervention. The methodology is basically qualitative and used questionnaires, field diary, interview and analysis of the textual corpus represented by the written production of the collaborator students. The theoretical foundation is based on rhetorical and argumentative studies and on the theory of genres in sociointeracional conception (Marcuschi, 2002) and on socio-rhetorical view that considers genre as a social action, motivated by a rhetorical situation (Miller, 1994, 2009; Swales, 1990; Bazerman, 2005). The work also focuses on argumentation as a discursive activity, whose achievement in the linguistic surface is susceptible to textual and linguistic-grammatical studies. In this sense, a didactic treatment was given to discourse markers based on Textual Linguistics, with special emphasis on interphrasal connectors. From the didactic point of view, the action research had two phases: the Implicit Instruction phase, which served as immersion and exposure of students to the Opinion Article genre, and the Explicit Instruction phase, in which the elements of textual structure were taught, as well as types of arguments and the logical and discursive markers that regularly appear in the opinion genres. The results from the action research carried out demonstrated a reasonable improvement of the writing process among the majority of the students, especially in relation to the argumentative text studied.