Estudo sobre as marcas de pontuação em manuscritos escolares de duas duplas de alunos portugueses recém-alfabetizados

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the occurrences of punctuation marks in school manuscripts of newly literate Portuguese students. The discussion takes place with the support of works on initial punctuation by Fabre (1990), Hall (1996), Ferreiro and Pontecorvo (1996), in addition to notions about collaborative writing seen in Calil (2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020). Faced with realities that recognize the importance of punctuation in the development of children's writing, the study carried out here adds to the already substantial reflections on the characteristics present in the manuscripts of newly literate children when it comes to the punctuation marks used and those not used, as well such as the location that punctuation occupies in children's writing and the reflections that young writers carry out when they are punctuating their written productions. The analyzes we carry out here are possible thanks to the implementation of the Ramos System in our methodology, which has been providing us with multiple perspectives on our object of study. The corpus of analysis was extracted from material collected in a 2nd year elementary school class at a Portuguese school in 2015. It belongs to the “Textualization Practices at School” (PTE) database of the School Manuscript Laboratory (LAME ) from the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL). Our research dossier consists of six textual production tasks, and the sample, defined by convenience, comprises the analysis of manuscripts from two pairs of recently literate Portuguese children. Our investigation is divided into two moments: first we observe the punctuation in relation to the manuscript, in which we analyze which, how many and in what position the punctuation marks occur, in addition to comparing the similarities and differences between the manuscripts of the same pair (intra-double ) as for the manuscripts between the pairs (interduals); in the second moment, we observed the verbalized punctuation marks and the comments (simple and extended) related to them, describing and analyzing the types of comments and the metalinguistic activities verbalized between students of the same pair, as well as between the two pairs. The data analyzed shows us that children are sensitive to the use of some graphic marks, such as capital letters, commas, full stops, paragraphs and exclamation marks, showing sophistication regarding the choices and uses of these signs. The notion of spontaneous speech and metalinguistic activity reveals the predominance of simple comments to the detriment of extended comments. Furthermore, punctuation marks are, for the children observed, enunciative, as seen in the cases in which commas and exclamations were used fluctuatingly to mark an enunciative construction of the characters' speeches. The lowest occurrence scores: colon, dash and quotation marks were directly related to the construction of direct speech.