Cartas pessoais entre crianças brasileiras, portuguesas e angolanas

This article analyzes the data resultant of the accomplishment, between 2008 and 2009, of an extension and research project on the international exchange of letters between teachers and students from elementary schools in the towns of Garça and Marília, São Paulo State, Brazil, with a school in the city of Azaruja, Portugal and another in the city of Luanda, Angola. It was developed by a team of students and teachers, UNESP, Marília, in order to promote the exchange via personal letters for that students, between 8 and 9 years old, could take possession of the written language, in this case Portuguese, and understand it as an instrument steeped in culture. The choice of this kind in the world of the epistolary genre was made because it promotes the participation of the Other in the configuration of dialogic relations in the elaboration of the statements, taken as a reference in a Bakhtinian conception of language. It aimed to (1) point, in the letters exchanged between teachers and students between the Portuguese, Brazilians and Angolans in the early years, the evidence of authorship linguistic behavior that could signal the beginning of autonomy in the use of the written modality of language, or signs of submissive behavior; (2) reveal the cultural content of language tools used to construct indicators listed on the customs of each people, including those constituting school doings. For the generation of data were used principles of action research, which enabled direct action, along with Brazilian teachers, and indirectly, in the case of the foreign teachers. From the analysis of the corpus of research - letters exchanged between teachers and students - it is clear that the appropriation of language as a speech act realized in human relations makes the old personal correspondence a powerful instrument of development in the area of the written language.

Concilier les données qualitatives et quantitatives: un défi pour les recherches en acquisition du langage

What is the role of qualitative data? How should mixed approaches be considered? Is it necessary to complement the quantitative approach by the qualitative approach (Maziére et al., 2010) or the opposite? How can these two approaches be combined in a Language Acquisition research? What are the possibilities of generalization that these approaches provide? Besides those necessary theoretical discussions, our starting point is a qualitative research on the acquisition of the plural morpheme in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in children between 1 year 11 months old and 2 years 7 months old (Hilário, 2012), whose linguistic production is intrinsically connected to their dialogic aspect (Bakhtin & Vološinov, 1973) and to the interaction among interlocutors (Bruner, 2004; Vygotsky, 1986). In this research through the usage of a computational tool (CLAN) it is expected to have more visibility of the quantitative results even if they are in a qualitative approach. Although, it should be taken into account the fact that each approach can achieve valid and relevant results (Valsiner 2000), i.e., with any given method it is possible to reach a kind of generalization (statistical or analytical).