Orientador: Maria Fausta Cajahyba Pereira de Castro / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T23:13:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Campos_ClaudiaMendes_D.pdf: 3503124 bytes, checksum: 283e18b27d3c7b24ed206df5e79580ae (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: Esta tese estuda a argumentação na escrita infantil. Trata-se de um estudo de caso, cujo objeto de análise são os textos em que há argumentação escritos por uma criança entre os cinco e os dez anos de idade. A pergunta norteadora do trabalho é como o texto argumentativo funciona na escrita da criança? A argumentação na linguagem da criança tem estatuto diferente da argumentação na linguagem do adulto, embora por vezes encontremos estruturas lingüísticas semelhantes em ambas. Além do fato de que na linguagem da criança há sempre um resto de outras falas, seja dela mesma seja do adulto - um resto que também existe na linguagem do adulto, mas que diferencia a criança por ser constitutivo de sua fala e de sua escrita -, outra característica diferencia a produção argumentativa da criança da argumentação na língua constituída, evidenciando suas especificidades: sua maior suscetibilidade aos deslizamentos promovidos pela imprevisibilidade da linguagem. Ainda que a fala do adulto também seja marcada pela incompletude e suscetível a deslizamentos e rupturas, ainda que o rompimento se dê também na fala do adulto, na linguagem da criança tais traços não são apenas uma possibilidade, não são eventuais - são constitutivos. Para tratar da argumentação no texto escrito infantil, recorro aos trabalhos de Ducrot na teoria da argumentação na língua (ADL), particularmente às noções de encadeamento argumentativo e de orientação argumentativa, que permitem fazê-lo tomando a argumentação como uma questão lingüística. Em ambas estas noções, não estão em jogo nem as informações contidas no enunciado nem suas condições de verdade, uma vez que o sentido de um encadeamento argumentativo é definido pela relação de interdependência existente entre os seus segmentos, tal que a significação da conclusão é construída pelo argumento e vice-versa, e a orientação argumentativa oferece as indicações acerca dos discursos que podem dar continuidade ao texto. Embora a argumentação na escrita da criança possa ser descrita a partir de tais conceitos, a heterogeneidade e a imprevisibilidade que a constituem abrem espaço para a deriva à qual a linguagem está sempre sujeita, possibilitando deslizamentos e rupturas no texto da criança e oferecendo lugar para a interpretação. Desse modo, a argumentação funciona no texto da criança como um contraponto à deriva à qual está submetida a linguagem - a partir dela, o texto resiste à dispersão e o sentido se constitui (Pereira de Castro, 2001). A argumentação comparece nos textos analisados na tese de diferentes maneiras: em alguns deles, ela coincide com um encadeamento argumentativo; em outros, ela se deve unicamente à orientação argumentativa; outros trazem à tona a incompletude constitutiva da linguagem; há ainda aqueles marcados por processos lingüísticos como o paralelismo e a polarização, que por vezes tendem a impedir os efeitos referenciais no texto da criança. Em todos eles, no entanto, quando a argumentação se impõe, a deriva é contida e os sentidos não se esgarçam / Abstract: This work studies argumentation in the child's writing. It is a case study whose subject is texts, written by a child from five to ten years old, in which there is a process of argumentation. The central question of the work is how does the argumentative text work in the writings of a child? Argumentation has a different quality in the language of a child and in that of an adult, though we sometimes find similar linguistic structures in both of them. Besides the fact that in the language of a child there are always traces of other speeches (either its own or an adult's) and that these traces also exist in the adult's language, but define children in being constitutive of their speech and of their writing, another characteristic singles out the argumentative production of the child in its relation to argumentation in the formed language, bringing its specificities to the foreground: namely, its greater susceptibility to the glidings generated by language's imprevisibility. Though the speech of an adult is also branded with incompleteness and liable to glide and break, though the rupture also occurs in the speech of the adult subject, in the language of a child such features are not only a possibility and not only circunstancial: they are constitutive. To deal with argumentation in the written text of a child, I employ the works of Ducrot, in his Theory of argumentation in language (ADL in the Portuguese acronym), mainly his notions of argumentative chaining and argumentative orientation, which enable me to work considering argumentation a linguistic question. In both notions, neither the information that one can find in the utterance, nor its truth-conditions are the matter, since the meaning of an argumentative chain is defined through the relation of interdependence which obtains between its segments, and, consequently, the meaning of the conclusion is built by the argument and is simultaneously built by it, and the argumentative orientation offers the clues to the speeches that can generate continuity in the text. Though argumentation in the child's writing can be defined by such concepts, the heterogeneity and imprevisibility which form such argumentation leave the field open to the drift that hovers all the time over the child, generating the possibility of glidings and ruptures in the child's text and offering interpretation a place in it. In such a scenario, argumentation works, in the child's text, as counterpart do the drift which hovers over the language: thanks to argumentation, the text resists dispersion and the meaning is generated (Pereira de Castro, 2001). Argumentation shows different faces in the texts this work analyses: in some of them, it coincides with an argumentative chain; in others it is only born of the argumentative orientation; others still reveal the incompleteness which constitutes language; there are still those branded by linguistic processes such as parallelism and polarization, which can sometimes lead to an impossibility of the referential effects in the child's text. Nonetheless, in all of them, when argumentation raises above these processes, the drift is won and the meanings are not frayed. / Doutorado / Psicolinguistica / Doutor em Linguística

<p>The question as to which language should be used as a medium of instruction in schools in multilingual societies is a controversial one. In South Africa, the question is often posed in binary terms: Should the medium of instruction be a familiar local language such as Xhosa or a language of wider communication like English? This study is an attempt to answer the above question. The study profiled the writing abilities of Grade 4 and Grade 7 pupils at Themba Primary, a school located in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape, in both their mother tongue, Xhosa, and in English, their official medium of instruction at school since Grade 4. Three written tasks, which consisted of a narrative piece of writing, a reading comprehension exercise, and an expository piece of writing, were administered to the pupils in English and Xhosa. The purpose of the exercise was to examine some of the implications for educational language policy of the differences in performance in the two languages. All the tasks were authentic, in that they were based on aspects of the pupils&rsquo / curriculum and written in the formal academic language pupils were expected to be exposed to in their respective grades. All the tasks were graded systematically under controlled conditions.</p>

<p>The question as to which language should be used as a medium of instruction in schools in multilingual societies is a controversial one. In South Africa, the question is often posed in binary terms: Should the medium of instruction be a familiar local language such as Xhosa or a language of wider communication like English? This study is an attempt to answer the above question. The study profiled the writing abilities of Grade 4 and Grade 7 pupils at Themba Primary, a school located in Khayelitsha in the Western Cape, in both their mother tongue, Xhosa, and in English, their official medium of instruction at school since Grade 4. Three written tasks, which consisted of a narrative piece of writing, a reading comprehension exercise, and an expository piece of writing, were administered to the pupils in English and Xhosa. The purpose of the exercise was to examine some of the implications for educational language policy of the differences in performance in the two languages. All the tasks were authentic, in that they were based on aspects of the pupils&rsquo / curriculum and written in the formal academic language pupils were expected to be exposed to in their respective grades. All the tasks were graded systematically under controlled conditions.</p>

Born into a visual culture, today’s generation of learners generally prefer a visually-rich multimodal learning environment. Tapping into the potential of visuals in language pedagogy, this study was aimed at discovering the impact of a visual presentation of grammatical concepts related to sentence structure on student writing. The study used a mixed methods design to analyse the impact of the visual approach first by statistically measuring sentence variety and syntactic complexity of student pre and post intervention texts and then using interviews to explain the nature of the impact of visuals on student conceptual understanding and its effect on their writing development. Statistical findings reveal that the experimental groups of Chinese students who were taught grammatical concepts in the context of writing instruction using a visual approach outperformed the students in the control groups who were given similar lessons in the context of writing instruction but using traditional printed hand-outs. Qualitative findings suggest that the visuals seems to have increased these students’ conceptual understanding of grammatical items that were taught, and this resulted in more sophisticated and syntactically complex texts after the intervention. The study supports the theory of contextualized teaching of grammar and proposes the use of external visuals that lead to internal visualization based on the cognitive theory of multimodal learning. In so doing, it extends the use of visual learning to grammar pedagogy. However, the findings also suggest that the visual approach would not work effectively in cultures that promote rote learning and decontextualized exercises in grammar with the sole aim of passing the exams. A shift in attitude towards grammar pedagogy in China is deemed necessary.