Academic Literacy: history of literacy and expectations about the writing practices of the Languages Course

In this article, I analyze the history of literacy of a student taking up the Languages Course from a private university in the city of São Paulo. Backed up by reflections from the theoretical field of the New Literacy Studies, I investigate how the student’s previous literacy history and her contact with speeches about writing had an impact on the development of expectations about the writing practices in the Languages course. To this end, I refer to stretches in a transcription from a semi-structured interview held in 2009, when the participant in the research was in the first semester of the course. The analysis undertaken herein aims to show that the understanding of the previous literacy history of the public entering university can collaborate so that the academic writing conventions and, in turn, those of the academic genres are not presented to the students as something part of the common sense, rather, as something which can be taught.    

Os gêneros escritos da história e da literatura

RESUMO: Este texto é resultado de uma pesquisa acerca dos gêneros escritos da história e da literatura. Ele aparece no contexto do debate sobre as relações que mantêm os dois domínios discursivos, afirmando-se já de início que história e literatura são dois domínios discursivos e que os gêneros que emergem desses domínios adquirem formas diferentes tanto pelo conteúdo que fazem circular enquanto ideologia, quanto pela pressão arquétipa de constituição instrumental: o gênero. Teoricamente, este trabalho se sustenta em dois dos nomes mais influentes no campo da rediscussão sobre a escrita da história: Peter Burke e Michel De Certeau. O primeiro retoma autores que defendem a escrita da história mais próxima do gênero literário e o outro apresenta uma tese sobre o trabalho dos autores de textos historiográficos.

USING SEMANTICS AS A WAY TO UNDERSTAND TEXTUAL GENRES

This paper examines the perception of the characteristics of a set of Textual Genres based on Linguistic Analysis, drawing on a Textual Linguistics investigation and offering Semantics considerations as support. This is an attempt to show how relevant semantic investigations are to extend a perception on the characteristics of Textual Genres, without excluding pragmatic and discourse elements. The texts analyzed in this study were taken from a questionnaire designed to assess freshman and senior university students from courses of Bachelor of Arts in Language, in terms of knowledge about different Textual Genres and their characteristics. The analyses focus on the semantic elements that act in respect of question and answer in the questionnaire, and which include: A Semantics-Pragmatics interface, the considerations of the propositional calculus, the theories of tense and aspect of verbal and semantic primitives. On these terms, it is set a relationship between the cognitive mechanisms that operate in the production and reception of texts and a look at the functions that organize semantic text processing. The main analysis in this paper will concern the interface of Textual Linguistics, from authors as Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) and Adam (2011), with Semantic investigations in terms of meaning processing.