A Carta aberta como instrumento de exercício para a cidadania: o trabalho com operadores argumentativos nos anos finais do Ensino Fundamental

Abstract

This work, developed within the scope of the professional master's degree in Letters from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, under the perspective of action research, makes use of problems identified within the scope of the Portuguese language classes of a 9th grade class, from the state school Márcio Nicolato, in the city of Rodeiro, in the state of Minas Gerais, to propose a pedagogical intervention in Portuguese language classes. In this context, the analysis of actions developed in the classroom in 2019, the initial written productions of the students and the electoral context of 2020 made this work assume the objective of addressing the open letter genre as a way of encouraging citizen mobilization, guiding students in the knowledge of the genre, of the linguistic peculiarities involved in its structuring, with emphasis on the relevance of the use of argumentative operators in this genre. Through a work based on the reading and production of argumentative genres, in particular, the open letter, it would be possible to work in a very contextualized manner with the argumentative operators, in view of their relevance to the genre on screen, a fact that could favor situations of reflection and language learning. The theme addressed in the production of the open letter concerned the appreciation of the city of Rodeiro, Minas Gerais, and the reality in which the students are inserted, whose initial written production demand was to denounce situations and problems experienced in the daily life of the municipality and claim solutions through municipal organs, thus contributing to the development of critical thinking and the exercise of citizenship. This final work consists of a document of a predominantly theoretical character (the dissertation) and a document with a more practical purpose - in which the texts and activities discussed with the students are inserted, namely, the pedagogical notebook. Under the methodological movement of action research (THIOLLENT, 2011), the interventional practice occurred, based on the perspective of the practice of linguistic analysis (GERALDI, 1984; MENDONÇA, 2006), of knowledge arising from Textual Linguistics, as to the argumentative operators (KOCH, 1989, 1933, 2002; ANTUNES, 2010; KOCH and ELIAS, 2016), textual genres (DOLZ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004) and open letter (SILVA, 2002; OLIVEIRA, 2018; MATOS, 2018). The didactic unit was constituted, initially, based on the observation of the classroom and the data obtained in the initial production proposal, using principles of the didactic sequence for this (DOLZ; NOVERRAZ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004; COSTAHUBES; SIMIONI, 2014). In this context, the corpus of analysis for the elaboration of the intervention and for the observation of the students' progress regarding gender and its linguistic characteristics was composed of the initial and final text productions. After analyzing the rewriting, compared to the initial production, the data revealed a significant development with regard to the open letter, an advance in the variety and sophistication of the argumentative operators, an expansion of knowledge about the city, made explicit through the argumentation, and the critical development and their mobilization as citizens. We can also highlight that the greatest gain of the intervention is in the social aspect, since the work based on the open letter genre favored giving the student a voice, developing his autonomy and encouraging him to practice citizenship. The classroom intervention started in February 2020, but was interrupted with the suspension of classes in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which resumed in October of the same year and concluded in January 2021.