O processo de referenciação em redações do vestibular do Instituto Federal de Alagoas - IFAL

Abstract

Although there has been a great improvement in students´ writing due to linguistic studies, teachers are still constantly complaining about the severe problems involving meaning construction in compositions produced by elementary school, high school or university students. Among the mechanisms responsible for giving meaning to a text, we can highlight reference, posing some questions related to the regularity of mechanisms used by the students and the recurrent strategies in text such as college entrance exams compositions. Based on these questions, we proposed an investigation using a corpus of texts composed of entrance examination compositions of IFAL, former CEFET-AL. Our objective is to identify and analyze reference and topic progression mechanisms used by the candidates, reflecting on the regularities found in this process. This study is supported by Text Linguistics in a sociocognitive perspective, and it is based on a conception of language as activity, understanding the text as an event in which linguistic, cognitive, and social actions converge (BEAUGRANDE & DRESSLER, 1981). The theoretical bases are constituted by the discursive view of reference, specifically by the fundamental notions of the Theory of Reference developed by Mondada and Dubois (1995). Reference is conceived, here, as an organization process of text reference (KOCK, 2004), and topic progression is understood as the theme maintenance (MARCUSCHI, 2000). The partial results have demonstrated what has been confirmed by Marcuschi (1998), when he states that the different anaphoric relations are given according to the text type, regarding genre or modality (oral or written). The relevance of this research is related not only to textuality factors study, among them, the textual reference devices, but also to the researches on teaching and learning of writing process.