Práticas de letramento acadêmico de estudantes do primeiro semestre de Pedagogia: desafios e aprendizagens no processo de apropriação dos gêneros discursivos na universidade

Abstract

Writing is one of the most socially relevant skills in the educational context. At university, academic writing becomes, among other things, a fundamental mechanism for intellectual development in the academic field. Therefore, it is necessary to appropriate the modes of writing that circulate in this field, which differ from other educational levels. This task is not easy for first-semester students who are still in the process of academic affiliation and need to engage with various discursive genres, some of which are unfamiliar to them. Based on this initial concern, the general objective of this research is to understand how first-semester students in the Pedagogy program expand their academic literacy experiences by working with constellation discursive genres. To achieve the proposed objective, it was necessary to immerse ourselves in the component “Reading and Production of Academic Texts,” offered in the aforementioned semester, in which we chose the VI Pedagogy Symposium as the focus of our study. The theoretical-methodological perspective adopted is based on studies of Academic Literacy, situating writing as an interactive process of dialogue between different languages, such as verbal and nonverbal. We also started from the concept of constellation discursive genres, understanding a movement of interconnection between the genres mobilized in favor of literacy practice. This is a qualitative study that helps to reveal the complexity of the social and linguistic aspects of the academic writing of the participating students. To construct the information that makes up the corpus of this study, we anchored ourselves in a participatory perspective and, as a method for interpretation, we drew inspiration from Bardin's (2016) categorical content analysis. In this study, we used three devices to construct information: participant observation, two questionnaires, and roundtable discussions. Applied at different stages of the research, they were constructed separately so that the information could later be analyzed and triangulated in order to answer the epistemological questions of this research. To understand the responses, based on content analysis, two units of record (UR) emerged: UR 1) students who highlighted challenges and learning in the academic reading process and UR 2) students who highlighted challenges and learning in the academic writing process. The results found reveal that the academic discursive genres used by students during the VI Symposium covered various modalities of language: written, oral, and multisemiotic. In addition, it was evident that the challenges and learning experiences in the academic sphere were particularly evident in relation to scientific research, simultaneous interaction with a plurality of textual modalities, and knowledge of the social function of each genre. The development of these actions in the component contributed to the research participants expanding their academic literacy in a critical, meaningful, and situated manner.