Tem que escrever?! Para quê?: representações sociais sobre escrita em uma comunidade escolar

Abstract

Reflections about teaching textual production in mother language have been necessary to answer the questions which have daily been noticed in classrooms in High School. Through teaching, we notice that the students resist writing. Their justification for this is said to be the lack of a practical use of the textual production they make at school. In order to verify the popularization of the knowing in Languages through the analysis of social representations (Project Representações sociais sobre a área de Letras (MOTTA-ROTH, 2008)), we have done a qualitative research of ethnographic basis in a school community. The research intended to answer the question What are the social representations about writing in the community of a group of students in a public High School in the city of São Gabriel, RS? . The corpus of this study was composed by data collected from written questionnaires, answered by some students and teachers from such school, from texts and from focus group. The theoretical-methodological support includes Social Representations (MOSCOVICI, 2007), Critical Discourse Analysis (FAIRCLOUGH, 1989, 1992, 2003), Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY, 1994, 2004) and writing in social interaction (BAZERMAN, 2006, 2007). The analysis comes from the identification of recurrent themes (TELLES, 2002) which arise from the social representations of these participants compared to recurrent themes in researches about teaching and learning writing. The analysis is done through school segments in relation to the thematic contents highlighted by lexical choices of the participants, observing the following categories: writing relevance; writing use; roles of teachers and students and difficulties concerning writing. This survey may give support to a practice of intervening in textual production teaching. The data point to the relevance of writing in the segments studied. This survey also allows us to identify the discursive genres linked to day-by-day life (letters, notes), especially the electronic ones (MSN) for the students.