The argumentative chronicle gender and the construction of its learning by students: the practice of the teacher and the Portuguese language manual

Abstract

In this text, we present a reflection concerning how Portuguese Language manuals - PLM - and teachers develop written text production activities of an “argumentative chronicle” in a classroom of the 8th year of a public school. The motivating question is: how the “argumentative chronicle” is worked in the activities of written production of a PLM and how the teacher transmits this work to the pupils? To answer it, we present a study based on the methodological procedures of Applied Linguistics (AL) with an interpretive base, focusing on the process of language use. The corpus for analysis is constituted by the proposal of written production presented by the Portuguese PLM “Português – Linguagens”, by classes in which the teacher developed the activities related to this production proposal and by the pupils’ texts. The main theoretical base is Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca ([1958] 2005), Toulmin ([1958] 2006), and Schneuwly (1988). With data analysis, we perceived that the students can, in general, produce written argumentative texts, leading to them reflections of extra-school knowledge on their production, considering stylistic and thematic marks found in the texts, not taught by the LDP or the teacher.