Práticas de letramentos acadêmicos na escrita da monografia: relações de poder na academia

Abstract

With the rise in the number of vacancies in Brazilian universities, discussions about students‟ reading and writing skills in higher education seem to gain visibility. It is common to perceive teachers complain about students who do not know how to read and write. Unfortunately, it almost has become common sense the idea that students‟ approval in exams would suffice as far as the development of their skills is concerned, as if reading and writing were learned in just one step of schooling. We believe that different language capabilities (BRONCKART, 1999) should be developed through genres, not just in schooling period, but also when the learner is in higher education facing the challenge of using certain genres accordingly, which is imperative for his academic life. Such genres are actually unfamiliar or have never been studied. From this perspective, our main goal is to investigate the nature of writing difficulties experienced by students who go to a private university, upon producing a monograph as an end-of-course Pedagogy paper. For this, we conducted qualitative, interpretive, and ethnographic research (ERICKSON, 2003; ANDRÉ, 2008). As subgoals, we intend to: a) identify hidden dimensions in a monograph‟s writing process; b) investigate how the insertion of voices and point of view is performed in the monograph; c) discuss power relations found in the production of this genre in a given discursive community. Our theoretical basis is supported by the New Literacy Studies (STREET, 2003, 2007, 2010; LILLIS; SCOTT, 2008) and by its Academic Literacies (LEA, 2006; LILLIS, 1999; LEA, STREET, 2014; IVANIC, 1998), which encompasses literacy not as merely a technical and neutral ability, but as a social practice, always involved by socially constructed epistemological principles. We, too, adopted the dialogical perspective of language (BAKHTIN, 2010), upon defending the social dimension of text genres. The Sociodiscursive Interactionism‟s contribution (BRONCKART, 2009), through its didactic vein, concerns the concept of language capacities in the proposal of a definition of the genre monograph (SCHNEUWLY; DOLZ, 2004, CRISTOVÃO; STUTZ, 2011). After data collection (audio recordings), done in classes of a discipline named “End-of-course Paper”, we sought for categories that mapped students‟ difficulties as far as the genre monograph is concerned. Besides that, we analyzed sections of those monograps and interviewed students and professors in order to triangulate data. The results have signaled that the difficulties in the production process are more related to sociodiscursive aspects (e. g. lack of appropriation of elements concerning research, power relations in the academia, identity building through writing) than to, strictly speaking, linguistic and textual matters (e.g. in regards to form and to overall textual organization).