Negociando certeza e incerteza em escrita acadêmica em inglês

Academic essay writing; EFL; expressing doubt and certainty

ARTIGOS

Negociando certeza e incerteza em escrita acadêmica em inglês

Leonardo Recski^*

Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina

ABSTRACT

Expressing claims with an adequate degree of certainty and uncertainty is one of the major setbacks for foreign language students writing academic essays in English. In order to differentiate beliefs from facts and evaluate statements in satisfactory and persuasive ways authors have to make use of epistemic comments which exert a crucial role in academic writing. However, regardless of its significance, little is known about how foreign language learners present their claims in their writing. This article compares exponents of doubt and certainty in the essays of 67 Brazilian speaking university students writing in English with those of 52 British and American learners of similar age and educational level in a corpus of about 68,000 words. A meticulous analysis of the essays reveals that the Brazilian writers deviate considerably from their native speaker counterparts in employing a more restricted variety of items, being much more assertive in relation to their propositions and demonstrating greater difficulties in transmitting an exact degree of assurance. This paper stresses a number of issues raised by the study and makes some pedagogical recommendations for developing skills in this central pragmatic area.

Keywords: Academic essay writing, EFL, expressing doubt and certainty.

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*

Agradecimentos: Gostaria de agradecer a Hamilton Wielewicki por seus pertinentes comentários e grande ajuda na edição deste artigo.

1

Definitividade é entendida aqui como quão definitiva uma proposição é. Nesse sentido, tem uma relação de sinonímia com o termo assertividade.

2

Para informações adicionais consulte Sardinha (000), Recski (00), ou acesse o site

www.lrecski.hpg.com.br

3

LOCNESS é utilizado para comparar os diferentes componentes nacionais do International Corpus of Learner English _ ICLE. O ICLE (Granger, 199) é um projeto multinacional que busca identificar as características compartilhadas por uma grande variedade de interlinguas. Nesse projeto, cada subcorpus nacional contribui com cerca de 200 mil palavras (cerca de 400 composições argumentativas). Os alunos que contribuíram com suas composições para o ICLE compartilham os seguintes atributos. Eles são adultos (cerca de 20 anos de idade) que estão estudando inglês como língua estrangeira, i.e. eles são alunos de EFL, não de ESL. Seu nível de proficiência é 'avançado', noção que é definida da seguinte maneira: eles são estudantes de graduação em língua inglesa no terceiro ou quarto ano de instrução. Embora as composições produzidas envolvam uma variedade grande de tópicos o conteúdo é similar, haja visto que todos os tópicos são argumentativos e não técnicos.

Datas de Publicação

• Publicação nesta coleção
  16 Abr 2014
• Data do Fascículo
  Jun 2004