THE WRITING PRODUCTION AND THE TEACHER’S WORK IN THE SUPPORT CLASSROOM

ABSTRACT

This paper approaches the writing production process of the textual genre “Response” on the teacher’s practice in a Support Classroom for Portuguese Language Learning (SAAPL, in Portuguese) - 6^th grade of a regular public school in the South-Central region of Parana State - Brazil.Based upon the concepts discussed by the Bakhtin Circle and the Applied Linguistics contributions in relation to reading and writing production, the work presented here aimed to attend and analyze a teacher’s practice in this context. The data collection took place before and after some theoretical and methodological interventions with the teacher in a collaborative way, providing theoretical support, guided discussions about the processes of reading and writing and their implications for teaching and learning of the language. The results indicate the necessity to provide the SAAPL teacher with theoretical and methodological support in regarding the processes, as well as to supervise and guide his/her practice during the work with the response in this particular context.

Written answer; Learning support classroom; Teacher’s continuous education

RESUMO

Neste texto, aborda-se o processo de produção escrita do gênero textual Resposta na prática docente junto a alunos de Sala de Apoio à Aprendizagem de Língua Portuguesa (SAALP) – 6º ano do Ensino Fundamental, na região Centro-Sul do Estado do Paraná - Brasil. Fundamentando-se nos conceitos do Círculo de Bakhtin e nas contribuições da Linguística Aplicada, a respeito de leitura e produção escrita, buscou-se acompanhar e analisar a prática de um professor nesse contexto. A coleta de dados deu-se anterior e posteriormente a intervenções teórico-metodológicas de modo colaborativas com o docente, propiciando-lhe aportes teóricos e discussões orientadas a respeito dos processos de leitura e de escrita e suas implicações no ensino e na aprendizagem de língua materna. Os resultados apontam a necessidade de se fornecer ao professor de SAALP subsídios teórico-metodológicos a respeito dos processos envolvidos, bem como acompanhar e orientar a sua prática pedagógica no trabalho com a Resposta nesse contexto específico de ensino.

Resposta escrita; Sala de apoio à aprendizagem; Formação docente continuada

Initial considerations

The writing production of the Response genre is presented as a very common language practice at the school environment. However, according to Silva (2010) and Prupest (2007), most of the time, the teacher assumes that this genre is familiar to the student or that it is not a text produced in the classroom, therefore requiring no teaching of the production process, as if it was known and familiar for all students.

This way, this article is about the teaching work on the process of Response production process, a genre that needs to be taught in the Support Classroom for Portuguese Language Learning (SAAPL, in Portuguese), as the student, in this specific context, is still in the process of formation and development as a text reader and producer (MENEGASSI, 2010d, 2010e).

Our aim is to analyze this work with the objective of discussing the possible guidelines to teaching this genre, in a way that allows the development of the student’s reading and writing abilities and competence.

To that, we debate Bakhtin’s theory conceptual notions, linking them to the discussions about mother tongue teaching and learning. Then, we demonstrate the method for data collection as well as present and discuss the teaching work with Response genre in SAALP, before and after developing collaborative tasks with the teacher.

Dialogism, replicable reading and interactive writing

In the propositions of Bakhtin Circle (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1976; BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1999; BAKHTIN, 2003), all oral manifestations work dialogically, denoting that the meaning of the words happens on dialogic, interactional work between subjects, social and historically located. In the words of Barros (2003, p. 2), the dialogical principle “is the condition to the sense of the discourse”, constituting, then, the founding property of language.

In the dialogic relationship between subjects, the utterance emerges, which takes to the concrete act of language use, the authentic and objective manifestation of language (BAKHTIN, 2003). According to Bakhtin, “[…] the concrete utterance (and not the linguistic abstraction) is born, lives and dies on the process of social interaction between participants of utterance. Its form and meaning are basically determined by the form and character of the interaction.” (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1976, p. 9). The utterance therefore presupposes enunciation, “the real soil which nourishes it” (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1976, p.10), that has as fundament the interaction between subjects; without this soil and this fundament, the utterance is not Bakhtin’s utterance anymore, but the utterance as abstract manifestation, sentence nor set of phrasal constituents, with no history, subjects or social space. The utterance in this way, “[…] pumps energy from a situation of life to verbal discourse […] [providing to the utterance] its alive historic moment, its unique character.” (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1976, p.10).

Over the works which compose the Circle, the utterance acquires a diversity of characteristics which are discussed and may be systematized, like a) every utterance is directly connected to the extra verbal pragmatic situation, and cannot be separated from that without losing its meaning (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1976); b) every utterance comes from someone and is directed to someone (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1999); c) every utterance is oriented to the already-said (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1999); d) every utterance is produced under the expectation of obtaining counter-words (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1999; BAKHTIN, 2003); e) every utterance is essentially polyphonic (BAKHTIN, 2003). These characteristics constitute it in its social aspect.

From such multiplicity of characteristics we think the text, oral or written, according to Bakhtin’s conception of utterance, since we consider its social aspects as constitutive ones, we analyze it considering its alive and concrete integrity.

In the mainstay of Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, the teaching of reading and written production at school is founded on dialogical basis. Thus, reading is not regarded as a monologic act, of mere identification or repetition. Being an utterance, the text implies a reading conception as act of replica (MENEGASSI, 2010d; ROJO, 2009). This way, according to Menegassi (2010d) and Rojo (2009), the reader is the one who puts him/herself as an active and critic respondent before the applied material, allowing the production of his/her own senses, which are revealed through his/her own words.

Concerning writing, the interactive principles inherent to text production remain evident. Writing, therefore, is understood as an action directed to the other and with a specific objective, amounting to in a space of social relations in which speaker and listener put themselves as subjects (BAKHTIN; VOLOCHINOV, 1999; BAKHTIN, 2003; GERALDI, 1993). It imposes the need to take into account, in the process of teaching the elements which compose the conditions of textual production: purpose, interlocutor, textual genre, text support, social circulation, author’s position, defined on Bakhtin Circle and discussed by Menegassi (2010e). Showing these elements under an approach of writing as work, oriented by the dialogic language conception and by the concept of “text production”, as exposed by Geraldi (1993) when dealing with differences between “text production” and “composition”, Menegassi explains:

[…] the purpose is always defined by a certain real social issue; the real interlocutor is the teacher, however, the virtual is marked as a specific member of social body; textual genre is defined according to the interlocutor and to the place of circulation of the text; the text support on its turn is also defined according to the previous elements; and social circulation is marked by the members of the social group that is aimed. With that, the author’s position is regarded as of social subject who exposes his/her opinion from the contra-word produced in a defined communicative situation. (MENEGASSI, 2010e, p.86).

Under such perspective, the written production in the classroom is established as an action of effective language, in which the producer subject exposes ideas and intentions that he/she wants to share with the reader to, in some way, dialogue with him/her, provoking an answer separating itself from the traditional practices of “composition” (GERALDI, 1993), in which artificial texts are written, since the purpose is only to fulfill an assignment determined by the teacher.

To institute reading and writing as interactive and replica actions in the classroom, the teacher helps the student to progressively build him/herself as an active and creative reader and producer of texts, which demands well founded knowledge about the stages involved in the process of reading and writing.

The process of reading and the process of writing

In the light of theoretical models from Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology, reading and writing are featured as processes formed by stages which are simultaneous and recursively employed by the reader during the text processing. These stages, when worked in a proper way in classroom, take the students to gradually build themselves as more autonomous, more critic subject readers of texts, able to produce their own words.

Thus, in order for the readers to establish replica reading, they initially recover and produce meanings in the process of recognition (here searching references and relations with the works of Bakhtin and Volochinov (1999), Bakhtin (2003) – first stage of the reading process, distinguishing the written code and associating it to the intended meaning in the text (MENEGASSI, 2010d). This stage is fundamental in order to the reader reach understanding, stage in which the reader, critic respondent, not only extracts content, but also produces inferences, that is, the reader can relate information and articulate textual data with his/her previous knowledge, individual experiences, through deep reading (MENEGASSI, 2010d). To achieve such level, the readers are in conditions of constituting their “own words”, what leads them to the third stage of the process: interpretation – “the stage of using the reader’s critic capacity, the moment they analyze, reflect and judge the information read” (MENEGASSI, 2010d, p.50), arousing, this way, a new text, as a result from the manifestation of reading made through information that differs from the original text. The last stage of the reading process is retention, meant to store the most important information in the reader’s memory. The readers may keep the textual data in their mind, without analyzing or judging them, as well as retain information resulting of the analysis and judgment performed about the text read. It is in this case that the readers change their point of view regarding the theme and develop a new saying, since they already have a creative and autonomous nature (MENEGASSI, 2010d).

The stages of the textual production process commonly pointed by literature are: planning, execution, review and rewriting (MENEGASSI, 2010e). Planning involves the set of actions or subprocesses that precede writing execution, like a) definition of production conditions, which work as guidelines to the student through the other actions of planning as well as the other stages of writing; b) reading, text analysis and discussions with the objective of supporting the generation of ideas concerning future production; c) selection and organization of the information needed for the production; d) study and appropriation of compositional structure of the genre to be produced; e) collection of student’s world knowledge information, regarding the theme presented to the text production.

Execution is the stage in which the producer effectively develops the text production, guided by actions developed during the planning stage. According to Menegassi (2010e, p.90), “[…] there is no definite way for this construction, because every person has an idiosyncratic perspective of his/her own, that is, personal for each individual for the production […]”; however, in the school environment, when the aim is students’ formation and development to be text producers, it is recommended that the teacher assists them in the stage of execution by helping them in the process of information progression in the text, as well as in writing rules, but without exempting them from the responsibility that authorship requires.

Review is understood as the stage where the produced text is critically evaluated and the changes that lead to operations of definitive adjustment are made. This evidences the constructive and working nature of the textual production. This process takes place during or following the process of execution and it can be done through three different perspectives: a) the student-producer; b) the classmate; c) the teacher. According to Menegassi (1998, p. 40), review “is a product that originates a new process, allowing a new stage in the text building”, since rewriting is made from those changes in the text. Thus, rewriting is the stage for improvement of the text, in order to make it more comprehensible to the reader, so it can fulfill its social and communicative function, establishing this way, in Bakhtin`s words, the continuity of interaction and the chain of speech communication. In the perspective of writing as an interaction process, rewriting is not only eliminating inadequate formal aspects in the Portuguese standard language, “but also adding, substituting, withdrawing and dislocating information in the text that is in the process of construction” (MENEGASSI, 2010e, p.92). In order to do so, a producer, besides considering what was pointed out in the reviewing stage, also resumes the actions developed in the stage of planning, recovering the conditions that guide the text production, re-reading some material or reading new ones and analyzing new aspects to deepen ideas. That is the reason why stages of the writing process cannot be observed as isolated and steady blocks: they occur simultaneously and resourcefully, while they grant the producer a cohesive group of strategies and skills.

In order to promote student’s formation and writing development, Menegassi (2010e, 2011), reviewing the stages of the reading process (MENEGASSI, 2010d) and the discussions by Solé (1998), proposes that students are guided during the process of writing production in different response modes: textual, inferential and interpretative. We will discuss these modes in the next section, which approaches the features of the Response genre.

The Response genre

The Response genre text is a language practice performed in the school environment, usually in an assessment event. While producing the text, the author – the student directed by the teacher in class – tries to answer to a question, explaining his/her comprehension about a text and defending his/her point of view about what was asked. Thus, the Response genre results from the relationship that the producer establishes among four elements: 1) the text read; 2) the question asked; 3) his/her knowledge and life experiences about the text and the theme approached; 4) the discussions and directions given by the teacher in the classroom.

When studying the features that constitute the genre referring to thematic content, style and compositional construction (BAKHTIN, 2003), we understand that the thematic content of the Response is determined by the aim of the question asked, which produces different genre modes. Thus, if the question requires that the students only locate information at the text surface and transfer it to the response (MENEGASSI, 2010c, 2011), without any manifestation of opinions and judgments, we have the thematic, text or literal response. If the question requires that the students make relations between the text and previous information to their knowledge, we have the inferential thematic response. On the other hand, if the question requires the intervention of opinion and previous knowledge in the topic that was read, making the students go beyond the reading and produce their own words, in a clear production of senses from the text meanings, the response is of an interpretative thematic nature. (MENEGASSI, 2010c, 2011). To Menegassi (2010c, 2011), those three response modes need to be worked in class, once they encompass all the stages of the reading process: recognition, comprehension, interpretation and retention (MENEGASSI, 2010 d). Furthermore, according to the author, it is also necessary to take into consideration the way questions are organized: firstly, asking questions of a textual response so that the student can learn to work with the text. After that, asking questions of an inferential response, so that the students need to establish relationships between the text and the information that they keep in their previous knowledge. At last, it is necessary to supply students with questions of an interpretative response so that they can reach the possibility of producing and adding their own meanings to the theme discussed. However, according to Menegassi (2010c, 2011) and in concordance with a research by Rodrigues (2013), the questions need to fulfill an increasing order of difficulty, to lead the reader to progressive reflection on the text that they are interacting with.

As for the composition structure, two forms of response organization are noticed taking into consideration the ways of the thematic contents presentation: in the first one, the response is abbreviated, and only the data required by the question are presented, because the theme manifestation happens only in command, e.g: question: Which are the characters from the text? Answer: João and Maria. In this case, the question and the answer make a single block of meaning, once the theme “characters from the text”, present in the question, is not recovered in the answer. In the second way of organization, the answer is complete, firstly with the repetition of the theme structure of the question, and after with the supplying of the requested information. Starting on the last question, the answer would be as follows: The characters from the text are João and Maria”, in which “the characters from the text” is the theme assimilated from the question. According to Silva (2010), the theme recovery is an essential element from the responsive process. In this sense, it is desirable that the response present a complete compositional structure, with the clarification of the theme and of what is understood about it. Menegassi (2010c, 2011) and Rodrigues (2013) state that it is the complete answer that should guide the genre teaching in class, mainly in the stage that occurs between the reader’s formation and development at school, as the case of SAALP, as this methodology makes the students start a reading concentration mode (MENEGASSI, 2010b) that makes them feed a closer dialogue with the studied text.

Another composition structure of response is presented by Menegassi (2010c). The author suggests that, after working with the textual, inferential and interpretive responses, the student should be led to produce another response, which gathers information from the previous answers in just one question: “What is this text about?” (MENEGASSI, 2010c, p.186), organizing the thoughts from the set of previous ideas and answers. According to the author, some marked features are observed in this structure: the initial statement taken from the text – that coincides with the textual response; the explanation on that statement – that emerges from the answer as inference; and exemplification of this explanation, coming from elements of the reader`s personal life – based on the interpretive response. This construction, according to Menegassi (2010c, 2011) and Rodrigues (2013),leads the written text production which brings the global perception of the studied text, the summary of the theme and the judgment made by the student, requiring a critical active position regarding the text that was read (ANGELO; MENEGASSI, 2011).

As for the language style used in the responses, differences may be observed by keeping in mind the modes of genre. As an example, the textual responses present referential language, exposing data in an objective way, without comments or evaluation, as they constitute the repetition of the textual information without showing the creative element. On the other hand, the interpretative responses may be followed by expressions such as “I think”, “in my opinion”, “according to my point of view”, depending on the intention of the one who answers in linguistically marking their opinion or not.

Having known the features related to the production context, thematic contents, composition structure and style of the response, we start to report and discuss the teaching work regarding the genre production in the context of SAALP.

The process of responses production in SAALP

Utterance Context

The program Support Classroom for Portuguese Language Learning (SAAPL, in Portuguese) was created in 2004, by Secretaria Estadual de Educação do Paraná – SEED (Paraná State Bureau of Education), to help students overcome their learning difficulties at the final years of Middle School, from 6th to 9th grades. These students attend Portuguese Language and Math classes out of their school period, and take part in activities aimed at overcoming the difficulties on these subjects, including their behavior as readers and writers¹. We selected SAALP due to the fact that educative actions in this context should focus on reading and writing, while the guidance of the response production is a meaningful strategy to make propitious the student’s formation and development as a text reader and producer.

The teacher we worked with during the collaboration actions is graduated in humanities, Portuguese and English language and post-graduated in teaching and learning of the Portuguese language. He has 17years of teaching experience. During the research, besides helping with the collection of data, materials and records, allowing the digital recording of his classes in the SAALP, he did his best in the reading and discussing theoretical and methodological texts, in the reflection on his procedures in class, as well as in the production and practice of activities to students in the Support Room.

We start then considering the actions for the responses production under the light of the stages of the textual production process – planning, execution, review and rewriting (MENEGASSI, 2010e) and of the reading process – recognition, comprehension, interpretation and retention (MENEGASSI, 2010d), starting from the assumption that both processes, reading and writing, cannot be set apart from each other when it comes to the production of the response to the reading question. Thus, in order to discuss the stage of response planning in SAALP, we take the conduction of all the work regarding text reading from the phase previous to the contact of the students with the pre-reading material until the reading process is completed, as the selection of information and organization of ideas regarding the response production – typical operations of the textual planning stage – are linked to the way that the processes of comprehension and interpretation were approached in the classroom interaction.

The production made before collaborative action

For analysis and discussion, we selected a classroom in which the teacher worked with activities related to fable “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse”, by Angela Mattos, without any theoretical and methodological interference from the research. The class lasted for 50 minutes and included the participation of eleven students.

Chart 1
– Text “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse”

The Country Mouse and the City Mouse

Once upon a time a country mouse invited his friend, who lived in town, to visit him. On the appointed day, the city rat went happily and excited to the countryside to try new experiences. However, at lunch time, he was disappointed with the served dishes: bland lentil beans and some roots that tasted like fresh earth. Appalled, he said: “Poor you, my friend! No wonder you’re so skinny! Come live with me in the city and together we will eat the finest delicacies of this country!” And there went the two mice to the city [...]

MATTOS, Ângela. The Country Mouse and the City Mouse. Unpublished text, Curitiba, 2006.

• Source: Organized by researcher.

The work before the reading focused in conversations about the differences between the countryside and the city, from inquiries made by the teacher, such as: “What is the difference between animals that are in the countryside and in the city? As for transportation, what are the differences between the city and the countryside?”. It is noted that these questions seek the activation of the students’ prior knowledge, but such questions are too generic, trivial, not very challenging nor linked to the text content, thereby not promoting motivation nor raising hypotheses to give purpose to the reading (SOLÉ, 1998).

After the initial dialogue, the teacher, while posing no links between this dialogue and the text, requested that each student read a passage aloud. During the reading, the teacher corrected the pronunciation of some words and called attention to the punctuation, but did not often let the student complete the sentence before asking the next student, unexpectedly chosen to continue reading. In these procedures, in SAALP, the reading is more a form of assessing the student’s achievement in the activity of oral emission of the text, deciphering and discipline, control than a form of sense production, as a way of meaning constitution from the text-reader interaction (MENEGASSI, 2010d). Evidence of this finding lies in the fact that students did not have a first contact with the text prior to the reading; furthermore, they were subjected to the reading of text fragments, a practice that prevents the production of a global meaning to what was read; still, the unexpected choice for the continuity of reading out loud shows that it serves to control class discipline: with this artifice everyone should pay attention to what the colleague read, so they know where he/she stopped, in case they are chosen to continue the reading.

After reading out loud, the teacher came back to the discussion about the differences between the countryside and the city, as exemplified in Episode 1:

Episode 1

Teacher – “Are the countryside and the city dependent on each other? The countryside depends on the city? The city depends on the countryside?”

Students – “No”

Teacher – “Are you sure?”

L12 – “The city depends on the countryside because of the meat they sell to the market for the people from the city to buy and eat...”

Teacher – “So... I asked if there is a dependence: yes or no?

Students – “Yes”

Teacher – “Yes... Why? Because if the countryside person overproduces, he has to sell... because out in the country he does not produce some things...what doesn’t he produce there, L12? What doesn’t he have there ... that he needs and cannot produce?”

[…]

Teacher – “The text says that the country mouse feeding was different from the city mouse’s. In the field he had roots and a few more things from the earth. To eat, the mouse did not run any risk. But the city mouse had better things, had cheese, fruit and such, but what happens: in the city he was in danger, he had more difficulty in obtaining the food. In relation to food, do you think the people in the countryside eat healthier than the people in the city?”

We realize that the teacher’s questions do not promote discussion of the text. In addition, they require a single answer, which should be brief, addressing, therefore, the search for homogeneity. This is clear in the teacher’s attitude toward the positioning of the student L12 - “The city depends on the countryside because of the meat they sell to the market for the people from the city to buy and eat...”.Just after that, the teacher asks, “so ... I asked if there is a dependence: yes or no?” that is, the teacher does not want to know what the student knows or thinks, he just wants that the student answers the question. Thus, this does not encourage the student to build and advance knowledge, but to remain on the condition that he/she is.

After the conversation, the teacher told the students: “I’ll write on the board a few things about what was spoken” and then wrote the following task:

Answer:

a)In the fable “The country mouse and the city mouse,” the city mouse has more difficulty in getting food. Do you agree?

b)In the story, the city mouse judges the countryside food as very weak (bad, insufficient). Do you agree?

c)Do you agree that there is dependency between the countryside and the city?

d)Make a list with things that we find in the countryside (e.g.: horse, house) and in the city (e.g.: house).

When relating the procedures of approaching the text with the process of planning the answers, it can be seen that the reading took place just to decode the linguistic material to transform it into sounds. There are no discussions promoted before, during and after reading to enable the student to identify textual information, to infer, and to interpret the text, but only peripheral conversations, far from the text. In addition, it is remarkable that it is not provided to the student the opportunity to gradually expand his/her knowledge, as the questions proposed for the production of written responses consist of repetitions which were presented before and after the reading. We assess that, repeating the same questions and centralizing the “dialogue” in his own voice, the teacher leads the planning strategy, orally anticipating the answer to the student. Thus, when drafting the answers, it is the student’s responsibility to transfer to the paper what was said by the teacher, performing a sort of collage.

Another aspect to be considered refers to the type of questions, considering that the method of questioning determines the selection of information to be used in the answers. We can see that the reading process is disregarded because the four questions offered to students appear as personal questions (SOLÉ, 1998), without promoting the study of textual information. It should be noted, also, that the questions a), b) and c) point in the command itself what is expected for an answer, leading to the interpretation desired by the teacher, thus limiting the criticism and the production of counterwords.

While students produced answers to the questions about what they had read there was no intervention by the teacher in order to help them understand the question raised and the text, he also did not help to compose the text, concerning compositional aspects of thematic content and style. Also, after students performed the task, no conversation was developed about the answers given by them, being neglected, therefore, the steps of revising and rewriting and the circulation of the texts. This supports the view of Silva (2010) and Prupest (2007), who believe the answer is not seen as a text production in the classroom, disobliging the process of teaching this genre writing.

We present some of the answers given by the students, after the work done with the text “The country mouse and the city mouse”:

a)In the fable “The country mouse and the city mouse,” the city mouse has more difficulty in getting food. Do you agree?

C3 – “Yes. In the city is a lot”

E7 – “Yes.”

b)In the story, the city mouse judges the countryside food as very weak (bad, insufficient). Do you agree?

C3 – “No, because it was healthy”

E7 – “Yes because in the city we depend on money a lot.”

c)Do you agree that there is a dependency between the countryside and the city?

C3 – “Yes, because the countryside xxxxx goes to the city.”

E7 – “Yes because the countryside’s food was very weak because they did not have cheese and other things.

We visualize that, in most cases, students show an impoverished reading of the text, with short or incomplete responses, which only report that they have implemented the proposed task without extending the dialogue with the text. The answer of the student E7 – “Yes because the countryside’s food was very weak because they did not have cheese and other things.”, repeats the presentation by the teacher after reading the text “But the city mouse had better things, had cheese, fruit and such, [...] – highlighted in the Episode 1; so the student does not act as a subject and author who reflects and constitutes his/her own words (BAKHTIN, 2003), but as a reproducer of statements that are not his/hers.

For these aspects, it can be said that the production of written answers in class is not established as an effective language action, in which the producer subject interacts, negotiates, works, reflects, discusses, evaluates, refutes and develops ideas, but as a written record, immovable, that only serves to inform that the student fulfilled the compulsory task. The training they received led to such actions.

The collaborative action with the teacher

With the intention of causing qualitative changes in the practice of teaching and learning of reading and writing in SAALP, we elected as methodological reference the assumptions of the collaborative research. In accordance with Magalhães (2004, p.76), collaborate, in this type of research, is an action in order to “[…] enable agent participants to make their mental processes clearer, and also to explain, to demonstrate, in order to create, for the other participants, possibilities to question, expand, replace what was put in negotiation.” Thus, through collaborative research, we enter a dialogical relationship and partnership with the teacher of SAALP, to assist in understanding the purposes and concepts that guide actions in the context of the SAA and the possible needs of transformation.

For the development of collaborative activities, various instruments were used, being the theoretical and methodological texts, discussion scripts, and reflective sessions the main ones. We asked the teacher to read the following texts:

- MENEGASSI, R. J. O leitor e o processo de leitura. In: GRECO, E. A.; GUIMARÃES, T. B. (Org.). Leitura: aspectos teóricos e práticos. Maringá: Eduem, 2010. p.35-59;

- MENEGASSI, R. J. Perguntas de leitura. In: MENEGASSI, R. J. (Org.). Leitura e ensino. 2.ed. Maringá: Eduem, 2010. p.167-189;

- MENEGASSI, R. J. O processo de produção textual. In: SANTOS, A. R. dos.; GRECO, E. A.; GUIMARÃES, T. B. (Org.). A produção textual e o ensino. Maringá: Eduem, 2010. p.75-101.

- BORTONI-RICARDO, S. M.; MACHADO, V. R.; CASTANHEIRA, S. F. Formação do professor como agente letrador. São Paulo: Contexto, 2010. Capítulos: A leitura tutorial como estratégia de mediação do professor; Aplicação da proposta de leitura tutorial como estratégia de mediação.

- MENEGASSI, R. J. Uma nota sobre a leitura em voz alta (texto que faz parte do artigo Avaliação de leitura). In: MENEGASSI, R. J. (Org.). Leitura e ensino. 2.ed. Maringá: Eduem, 2010. p.101-105.

With a copy of these texts, we provided a discussion script containing guiding questions of reading and activities that incited the teachers to reflect on their practice in SAALP. The texts and scripts were taken as objects of discussion in reflective sessions that occur at the school at the teacher’s activity time (outside classroom). At these sessions, together with the teacher we could: a) discuss the differences between the processes of formation and development of the reader; b) study the concepts and steps of the process of reading and writing; c) point out the features that the reading questions must present; d) critically analyze some of reading and writing activities applied in SAALP; e) evaluate and rate the suggested reading questions for working with SAALP; f) produce relevant questions for SAALP; g) point out the characteristics of the Response genre.

The production of answers after collaborative actions

For analysis and discussion, we selected two classes in which the teacher developed activities related to the text “Empty Wagon”, after reading and discussing theoretical-methodological texts. Each class lasted for 50min and eight students took part in it.

Chart 2
– Text “Empty Wagon”

Empty wagon

One morning my father, who’s a very wise man, asked me to take a walk with him in the woods and I gladly accepted. He stood in a clearing and after a short pause, asked: “Can you hear anything other than the birds chirping?” I concentrated on what I was hearing for a moment and then answered: “I’m hearing what sounds like a wagon.” “Exactly; an empty wagon,” said my father. “How do you know the wagon’s empty if you haven’t seen it yet?” I asked. “Well,” replied my father, “it’s easy to tell that the wagon’s empty because of the sound it makes. The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise it makes!” Even after all these years and now as an adult, whenever I hear someone talk too much or too loud, trying to impress or intimidate, mistreating others, bullying, interrupting everyone’s conversation, being a know-it-all, trying to prove they’re better than everyone else or being stubborn and proud, I can still hear my father say:” The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise…”. RODRIGUES, Wallace Leal V. E, para o resto da vida... Matão, SP: O Clarim, s/d.

a)Father and son were travelling through the woods, when suddenly they hear a noise. What was that noise? b)The father, after listening attentively, said it was empty. How did he get to such conclusion? c)During the ride, the son learned a lesson he never forgot. What did he learn with the sentence “the emptier the wagon, the louder the noise”? d)The son compared the wagon to a person. Which are the flaws an empty person may have? e)What can I do in order not to be compared to an “empty wagon”? f)Based on the information given in the preview answers, write what you understood of the text.

• Source: Organized by researcher.

Starting from the phase previous to the use of the text, we found that the teacher developed pre-reading activities, which, according to Taglieber and Pereira (1997), and Solé (1998), aim to drive motivation and, consequently, the construction of objectives to the reading, activate the student’s previous knowledge about the content of the text, as well as to prompt the production of previews and questions regarding the text. To this end, questions from the title were proposed:

Episode 2

teacher– Before I give you the texts... Imagine that the text has this title here… “The Empty Wagon” (writing on the board)… So, I ask you… What comes to your mind?

L26 – An empty wagon...

Prof.– Yes... An empty wagon… But where is this wagon? What kind of wagon is this? Where is it? When I talk about a wagon, what does it remind me? A city, a center?

L23 – A farm...

[...]

teacher.– So, when we have a title… such title gives us some information in advance. Do remember what we spoke of during the last classes? […] So, illustration… title… the source where the text was taken from… they serve me as clues so that I can make predictions… so I start to imagine what this text will be about…. […] After reading we will see if the predictions were confirmed… that is… if that which I thought about will really be in the text... [...]

In these initial interactions, we can see that the teacher stimulates the production of previews about the text from information regarding daily facts and world knowledge, causing the participation of the student since the beginning of the process and favoring the possibilities of attention and comprehension when it is time for the reading. In addition, it clarifies the importance of the title, besides establishing linkages between pre-reading and reading, what enables the student to institute a purpose for the reading and to understand the reason of the pre-reading activity.

After the initial interactions, the teacher asked for a silent reading of the text, a moment in which the students had their first contact with the material and could constitute individual meanings to the reading. The specificities of silent reading and out-loud reading were discussed in collaborative actions, demonstrating satisfactory results, because the teacher learned that not all texts are appropriated to an effective out-loud reading; the professor understood that for a text such as “The Empty Wagon”, the silent reading allows the reader to create a picture of the description presented by the narrator, what results in the production of the meaning of the text (MENEGASSI, 2010b).

After silent reading, the teacher went back to the previews made before the reading, an important resource to teach the student to verify and analyze the previously raised hypothesis:

Episode 3

Teacher – So... Those predictions we made... what we imagined… were confirmed or not?

Students – No...

Teacher – Wasn’t he a lumberjack?

Students – No...

Teacher – Wasn’t he selling anything?... The wagon didn’t tumble down… that’s why it was empty?

Students – No…

F8 – The wagon was coming down the road… making a lot of noise. Then the father asked his son if he was listening to that noise... Then he heard the noise of the wagon...

Teacher. – Ah! So, let’s go... I will read the text for you…

Getting back to the predictions previously made, we notice an emptying of the activity developed before the reading, as the professor focused only on that which was not confirmed in the text – “Wasn’t he a lumberjack? Wasn’t he selling anything? Didn’t the wagon tumble down?”, transforming the pre-reading in a game of right or wrong, without purpose from a pedagogical point of view. As pointed out by Solé (1998), the activities before the reading, if not conducted properly, deviate from the theme and main aspects of the text, may tire the students or not provide clear organization. This way, in the pre-reading and in the verification of the predictions made, the most relevant elements must be encapsulated, this will help the apprentices to face the reading and, consequently, produce more coherent answers to the questions made.

Another aspect that can be highlighted refers to the fact that from the student F8’s positioning, which summarized what was read, pointing out the constitution of individual meaning to the reading, the professor only manifests agreements, saying “Ah!”, but the teacher does not instigate the student to conclude the understanding of the text, interrupting him to read. When interrupting the student, the professor leads the practice to a monologue reading, revealing the difficulties in articulating the different voices that circulate in the classroom.

Following the activities in SAALP, the teacher sought to perform a shared reading of the text, telling the students: “I will pause sometimes and I want your participation… I want you to participate by saying what you could understand…”. The shared reading was an element of discussion of collaborative actions, and it is understood as the practice in which the teacher and the students dialogue while they read the text together, formulate predictions and questions about the text, evaluate the predictions made, search for the answers to the questions, clear doubts, sum up ideas, relate the textual information to the previously stored knowledge (SOLÉ, 1998; MENEGASSI, 2010a). We evaluated that the practice developed by the teacher did not correspond to a shared reading, but a directed one, regarding that the responsibility for conducting the reading was entirely the teacher’s: only the teacher asked questions, and the students were supposed to answer them concisely.

Furthermore, we noticed that the questions asked by the teacher during the reading were only about the meaning of words in the text, for example: “What is ‘wise’ for you?”; “What does ‘gladly’ mean”?; What is the meaning of the word ‘stood’?”; What does ‘clearing’ mean?”. When asking only about the meaning of lexical items, the relation between the textual information, the grasping of basic ideas and global comprehension of the text were darkened, restricting the student’s involvement with the reading. Thus, it was noticed that the students participated more actively in the beginning of the reading, though with concise answers to the professor’s questions. During the reading, the students’ voices ceased until only the teacher’s voice was left, who, instead of instigating reflection and reasoning, only chose to explain the text:

Episode 4

Teacher – I can still hear my father say:” The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise…”So, the son here has put into his life some things he learned from his father during that ride... He learned something from the ride… Even a sentence the father said was enough for him to imagine that phrase in his daily routine… To his life… How that serves me?... to know that the empty wagon makes a lot of noise… So, the son, after that ride, learned a lesson… the text is not a fable, but it brings a lesson learned… So, we have to think about what the text wants to teach us… Why it is good for our lives… Just like the son learned something with it… ok?... After this reading… the comments… I hope I have answered some of your questions, especially with these words in which we took a break to have a chat…

In this statement, the teacher no longer instigates the students, formulating new questions that could amplify their knowledge, maybe despondent because of the lack of participation he had. At this moment, the basic assumption of shared reading in the classroom is erased: the interaction with the students, in order to lead them to the comprehension of the text.

In episode 4, it is pointed out that the teacher mentions some times that the son learned some things from the father and that the text brings about a lesson, but he does not debate with the students what was the lesson the son learned nor the lesson in the text, aspects which are not explicit in the text materiality, but must be constructed by inference. Therefore, the teacher lets his point of view appear: the inferences emerge naturally from the reading, and that they do not need to be taught in SAALP.

Due to the pointed out aspects, in the reading practice, which is a strategy inherent to responses planning, students were little prompted to analyze, associate information, infer, reflect, and discuss about the textual content.

Another strategy of the planning stage of the response textual production consists in the selection of information relevant to writing. We understand that, for the Response genre, the selection depends on the modality of the provided question. In this sense, the questions of textual answer, (MENEGASSI, 2010c), such as a) and b) from the questionnaire prepared by the teacher, determine that the choice of information is based exclusively on the text. On the other hand, questions with inferential answers, (MENEGASSI, 2010c), such as c) and d), define that the choice of information comes from the dialogue between the reader, the question and the text. In the case of interpretative questions, the information depends on the reader to go beyond what was read and produce his/her own words, (MENEGASSI, 2010c, 2011), as seen in question e). When planning the exercises following these modalities, the teacher’s work highlights the reading process approach – recognition, comprehension, interpretation and retention (MENEGASSI, 2010d), discussed in collaborative actions. This provides the reader’s development, and the teacher works at an increasing level of textual production complexity, once part of the process of locating the information advanced to the level of production of new textual information, via the process of inference, until it reaches the level of generating the reader’s own words. Therefore, the organization and the sequence of questions have shown to be proper to the context of the SAALP.

To better guide the student in the selection of appropriate information to the production, the teacher clarified some things to the students: “We will go over some exercises… these exercises, some of you will have to go back to the text… some answers are according to the text… others are about interpretation… the interpretation ones, can you find the answers in the text?” […] To interpret is to show what you have learned with the text… in the case of the text we have read, has the son leaned anything!? “Interpretation question is based on my knowledge and on the information the text brings to me… If the text gave me much information added to what I think, and my information… I can make my own answer. So, there are answers for which you need to go back to the text, reread… and answers that are interpretative, which are your opinion…” These comments dialogue with the readings and discussions done in collaborative actions, which aimed to reflect the process of reading, so that the teacher had whatever was necessary to develop a gradual process of appropriation in the possible levels of the text. Thus, we visualized that the teacher shows awareness of the question’s modalities, and worries about differing the questions from the textual answers from the interpretative answers.

However, it seems that the need to pay attention to the order of the questions, as Menegassi (2010c) defends, was not clear to them, as it is stated in episode 5, when the teacher orients the students on the difficulties of producing an answer from inference:

Episode 5

Teacher – A tip for you... when you are having a test, whichever test it is… Math, Geography, History or Portuguese… there are some exercises to do… when you get to c) like this one… which is the most difficult one… you take longer to do it…. it doesn’t flow… Will you get stuck there until the bell rings? Is that how it’s done? No! So, what do you do?... You skip c) if it is difficult, skip this exercise, which is difficult, and go to the others… solve the other exercises then you return to this one that is more difficult, that requires more time to write an answer…

With these instructions, the teacher suggests that the student, when facing such difficulty, ignore the inferential question – “Skip letter c) if it’s difficult” – and go to the other ones, one of them being inferential and the other one interpretative. However, with no understanding of question c) – which requires students to explain what the son learned with the phrase “The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise…”– the student cannot answer the next question – the questions depend on the comprehension of c) – and, therefore, the student cannot advance in the reading process. However, we see that the teacher has not assimilated that the questions need to follow an increasing order of difficulty, in a way that it leads the reader to a progressive reflection about the text with which the reader is interacting. This way, the professor ordered the questions about the text “The Empty Wagon”, in an adequate way because it probably repeated the model suggested in the scripts of the discussion, without being aware of the reason of the order and sequence suggested.

Concerning the characterization of the Response genre – another planning strategy in the answer production – the teacher asked that the answers given were complete, reminding that the complete answer is “the one in which I get part of the question… use it in the answer and then go to the information”. In addition, it was requested that the students remembered that the answer is always a small text and that it should begin with capital letter. These explanations have shown to be positive, evidencing that the answer, after the collaborative actions, was characterized as text production that should be taught in language class.

In the phase of implementing the written responses production, in which the students executed the task of answering the reading questions, the teacher helped to conduct the construction of the phrases, the organization of the genre compositional structure, the coherence of the presented information, as well as the articulation of the information with cohesive elements, indispensable elements concerning SAALP context.

For the production of the first few questions – the ones with textual responses – the teacher’s help focused on the compositional constructions of the genre:

Episode 6

Teacher. – “Father and son were walking through the woods when, suddenly, they heard a sound. What was that sound?” Remember some little details… I am starting to answer… I am creating a little text… aren’t I? How do I start it?

L26 – With a capital letter…

Teacher – What else?

L23 – Space for the paragraph…

Teacher – Ok… The answer is complete... I am going to do it with you on the board… Father and son were walking through the woods when, suddenly, they heard a sound. What was that sound?

A27 – A wagon…

Teacher - Am I only writing this? I want a complete answer… What should I do, then?

L26 – It was the sound of a wagon…

Teacher – What else can I write?

L23 – They heard the sound of a wagon.

L23 – They… Who?

Teacher – Father and son… so… (Writing on the board with the help of the students) Father and son were walking and heard the sound of a wagon... Note that the simple answer would be only... a wagon… Note that “Father and son were walking and heard the sound” is in my question… A complete answer é when I take part of the question and, then, go to the information asked.

It can be noticed, in this dialogue, that the teacher detains the compositional structure of the answer, asking for it to be complete, which is, once again, defined by the educator as: “a little text” and “a complete answer is when I take part of the question and then go to the information asked”. However, we consider that the textual data need to be brought up and discussed with the students to provide a more productive dialogue with the text and, therefore, a more active response. So, it would be important the return to the planning step, with the rereading and discussion of the sentence that origins the answer response, verifying, also, if the students realized that only after the father’s confirmation –”That’s right, said the father, it’s an empty wagon”, it is possible to identify the sound heard by the two characters. That way, the articulation between the planning and the execution steps, in the written answers, could lead to a greater progress in the development of the reading and writing skills of the SAALP student.

The absence of care concerning the textual information – fact noticed in the conduction of the activities related to pre-reading, directed reading and oral text discussions – can also be verified in reading questions elaboration itself. The questions only refer to the initial data of the text, undermining the construction of the textual sense, as the localization of the information is concomitant and recursively used by the reader throughout the whole text processing (MENEGASSI, 2010d).

It is verified that the disregard concerning the text reverberated in the production of the inferential and interpretative responses. The students presented difficulties in executing the writing production of these types of answers, as, during the planning step, there were not many reflections concerning the contents of the text, and there was no effective work done with the textual information, an indispensable aspect when it comes to the SAALP context. Episode 7 demonstrates how the teacher conducted the production of the answer to question c):

Episode 7

Teacher – During the ride, the son learned a lesson that he never forgot. What is a lesson?

(silence)

Teacher - There was a learning… wasn’t there? Didn’t the son learn? He was a child and he went wandering through the woods with his dad... and then it says…”I became a grown up and still remember these words”... he learned a lesson he never forgot… what did he learn with the phrase: “The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise…”? (silence)

Teacher – Now, the answer is more difficult… after all, what did the son learn with the phrase? He learned something, didn’t he? There are some clues at the end of the text… How will you do it? You will reread the end of the text and, then, set up your answer…this answer is not totally ready in the text, for you just to get there and find it… you have to read it and organize your answer based also on the text… but you can draw your conclusions on what he learned from that…he learned that an empty wagon makes a lot of noise… what does that mean to his life? What lesson did it bring? What did he learn with it? This is one of the most difficult to answer…

(silence)

Teacher – Think about people… concerning people... forget the wagon... transform it to our lives… our relation with people… what did the man learn?

(silence)

Teacher – This one is a tough one, isn’t it? L23, can I take yours?

L23 – I haven’t finished yet… I just got it now…

Teacher – You just understood the question c) now? What did you understand?

L23 – hmm… like… an empty person is the one that doesn’t have love, affection… it will not be treated well…

Teacher – So, L23 said he learned an empty person is the one that doesn’t have love, affection… and that, consequently, she won’t be treated well… right!

[…]

Teacher – Let us think together…. What is an empty person?

L26 – Someone that doesn’t have love... doesn’t have affection…

Teacher – Doesn’t have affection… what else? Read the end of the text (briefly looking at the text): treats people with anger… speaks too much…interrupts people…

During episode 7, facing the silence of the students, the teacher re-asks the questioning: “[…] forget the wagon... transform it to our lives… our relation with people… what did the man learn?” to L23, which responds that “an empty person is the one that doesn’t have love, affection… it will not be treated well…”, response accepted by the teacher, but distant from the discussion proposed by the question and the text. The difficulties compel the teacher to ask the students to go back to the textual information, which were neglected during the execution of the textual response step: “There are some clues at the end of the text… How will you do it? You will reread the end of the text and, then, set up your answer…”, showing that inferential and interpretive responses relies on a well-directed and succeeded execution of the textual responses.

Due to the difficulties presented by the students, we saw that the worrying with production of complete answers, demanded in the production of textual answers, does not exist anymore. The teacher exclusively focused on the thematic aspects, in this second moment, and did not explore the compositional structure of the answer.

The revision step, which consists on the critical analysis of the produced text, with an intent to encourage textual growth, was carried out during and shortly after the execution of the answers. As this process was showing not to be still developed enough for the SAALP students, the revision was done through the perspective of the teacher. Besides identifying the problems, the teacher made comments and gave directions for the rewriting, and constantly instigated the students to interact with each other, saying: “When you finish your answer… read it again and then you find the errors”; “Read the answer to see if that was what you really needed to say…”. In that way, through these orientations, the educator pursued teaching the student to raise, him/herself, the aspects to be changed; what, according to Menegassi (2010e), is the ideal tactic of revision and which needs to be worked with the SAALP students, so they can, in the future, be in a position where they competently auto correct their own texts.

It was noted that the different types of responses worked by the SAA offered different points of view at the revision process. Thus, while in the textual responses, the revision evidenced the structural composition of the genre, the inferential and interpretive ones evidenced the textual contents.

In relation to the revision of the textual answers, the teacher went back to the complete response to question b issue: “The father, after carefully listening to the sound, said it was empty. How did he reach that conclusion?”:

Episode 8

Teacher – (after reading what the student had written) Look, here, L26. You gave a direct response. Is it a direct answer that the teacher is asking?

L26 – no…

Teacher – You didn’t use anything from the question… Let’s answer it completely? The question is the father reached the conclusion…what conclusion did he reach?

L26 – That the wagon was empty…

Teacher – And how did he reach the conclusion that the wagon was empty?

L26 – It was making too much noise…

Teacher – So, what is the answer like?

L26 – Reached the conclusion…

Teacher – Who reached the conclusion?

L26 – The father…

Teacher – Then… The Father reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty because… (the teacher asks L26 to finish the answer by himself).

It is noted that, initially, the teacher draws the attention to a production problem: “You gave a direct response. You didn’t use anything from the question…”, making it clear to the student what should have been revised. Then, proposed to the student changing the form of the text: “Let’s answer it completely?”, using, for it, the first person of speech “you”, intending to establish a process of dialogue with more approximation between the roles of teacher and student. Secondly, the teacher oriented the student through the textual improvement procedures, recapturing what was asked in the question, “The question is the father reached the conclusion…”, and others aspects, “…reached what conclusion?” “And how did he reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty?”. During the rewriting process, it is found the student’s difficulty, as the educator asks: “So, what is the answer like?”, and the student answers: “Reached the conclusion…”, forcing the teacher to ask a new question “Who reached the conclusion?” and help to elaborate a more formal response “Then… The Father reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty because…”. These aspects show that, in the SAALP context, the textual revision implies teaching, persisting, orienting, practicing, exercises, trials.

In the inferential and interpretative response revisions, the actions of the teacher were focused on the thematic content, as exemplified in the episode 9:

Episode 9

Teacher – In letter d)… “The son compared a wagon to a person. Which flaws can an “empty” person have?”… and then you have put… “the carriage is noisier”… it is missing the comparison to a person… so, it is not the wagon that you are going to talk about… you can mention it… come on... the person is noisier… speaks too much… you can write it down…and, at the end of the text, we have another information… the text has a lot of tips… look here… “interrupting everyone’s conversation, wanting to be the only right one”… has all those flaws plus what you guys understood… another thing…each word you put you separate it with commas and the “and” goes at the end…

In this scenario, the teacher starts the revision showing the problem in the production: “and then you have put… “the wagon is noisier”… it is missing the comparison to a person… so, it is not the wagon that you are going to talk about…” and, then, guiding the student concerning the usage of typical linguistic-discursive operations of the rewriting process (MENEGASSI, 2012e). Thus, in order to bring coherence to the text, the teacher conducted the student to replace the word “wagon” with “person” - “so, it is not the wagon that you are going to talk about… you can mention it… come on... the person é noisier…” - and, to complete the information that were not fully given to the reader, the teacher guides the student to an addition operation - “and, at the end of the text, we have an other information… the text has a lot of tips… look here… ‘interrupting everyone’s conversation, wanting to be the only right one’… has all those flaws plus what you guys understood…”. It is noted that performing the operation of adding information demanded a new textual revision, but, this time, focused on the graphic element and for the connective usage: “each word you put you separate it with commas and the “and” goes at the end…”.

From the changes suggested and guided by the teacher, the rewriting of the responses emerged, confirming Menegassi’s view (2010d) that revision and rewriting are inseparable steps.

After the students answered the questions, the educator requested some of them to read their responses. In this moment, he commented about them, suggested some complements, compared the different types of answers. Therefore, there was a divulgation on the textual productions, indispensable moment for a practice of production based on a dialogic conception of language.

We present the responses given by the student A27 referring to the “empty wagon” questions, taking note that the teacher helped his pupils, both individually and in groups, during the execution, revision and rewriting steps and corrected the spelling mistakes of a few productions:

a)Father and son were walking through the woods when, suddenly, they heard a sound. What was that sound?

A27 – Father and son were walking through the woods and heard the sound of a wagon.

b)The father, after hearing carefully, said that it was empty. How did he reach this conclusion?

A27 – The father reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty because it was making a lot of noise.

c)During the ride, the son learned a lesson he never forgot. What did he learn with the phrase: “The emptier the wagon, the louder the noise…”?

A27 – He learned that, in life, there are people that look just like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite.”

d)The son compared the carriage to a person. What flaws can an “empty” person have?

A27 – It can have flaws, no love, no kindness and with lies, be rude and bad.

e)What can I do to not be compared to an “empty wagon”?

A27 – To not be compared to an empty wagon, we have to be kind, loving, fond and not offend friends.

It seems that students’ responses reflect the teacher’s leading with the process of reading and writing in SAALP, characterizing the answers as textual productions and not only fragments or single words that function to inform the accomplishment of a school obligation.

For questions a) and b) of textual response, the students present complete answers, following the teacher’s instructions. So, to answer question a), he/she repeats the same structure of the question - “The father and the son were walking and heard a noise” and then provides the information required by selecting the text - “a wagon”.

For inferential answer questions and interpretative response, A27 presents abbreviated structures, displaying only the data requested in the question, since the theme manifestation is only on command. We quote, as an example, the answer to question d) - “It can have flaws, no kind, no love and with lies, be rude and bad.” in which the topic “flaws that an ‘empty’ person can have”, present in the question, is not recovered in the response. This is because during the stages of execution, review and rewriting of inferential and interpretative responses, the teacher did not ask for the complete answer, passively accepting the abbreviated texts produced by students, to provide help with the selection and organization of information pertinent to the production of responses.

On the thematic contents, the student A27 demonstrates, with his responses, interaction with the text and with the discussions in the classroom. Thus, he brings to the answers the student L23’s comment in Episode 7 - hmm… like… an empty person is the one that doesn’t have love, affection… it will not be treated well…”, the teacher’s guidelines, also in Episode 7 - Read the end of the text (briefly looking at the text): treats people with anger… speaks too much…interrupts people…”as well as textual information - “a person talking too much, screaming (in order to intimidate), treating others with inappropriate, arrogant rudeness, interrupting everyone’s conversation, wanting to show that he is the owner of the reason and absolute truth.” In responsive position, the student therefore actively appropriates these “other’s words”, adds to such words his knowledge and his experiences, converting them into “own other people’s word”, to a new mean then appear, “my word” (BAKHTIN, 1979/2003). In the answers, his own words appear as an example on the question c): “ He learned that, in life, there are people that look just like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite.”, which already presents some creative character, showing a replica expressed in the dialogue.

After working with textual, inferential and interpretative responses, the teacher posed the last question: “Based on the information given in the previous answers, write your understanding of the text”. He explained to the students that in order to answer it, it would be necessary to “... get the information that you have already written [...] then on the exercise f) you will only gather the preceding information [...] these are things you have already written [...] you will now join these information and will assemble a new text... but with the information you already have [...] I will not invent anything ... I’ll just gather the information... “. In order to make students understand the purpose of this question, the teacher presented the following example: “If I get the response from exercise f) and go out in the hallway ... find a person and read the answer to her/him ... that person has to be able to understand the text”. We note that the explanation and the teacher’s exemplification follow the methodology advocated by Menegassi (2010c, 2011), the subject of discussion in collaborative action, which guides the work with the “final response” (RODRIGUES, 2013, p.165), in which the information presented in previous answers are brought together in only one answer. We note, however, that the question is not clear about this claim, by requesting that the student write what he understood about the text, based on previous answers. As the question was not formulated correctly, the teacher had to repeat the explanations about what had to be done in the response a few times, as well as individually guide students in production.

We take as theme of the discussions the answer given by the student A27, as a representative sample:

Previous answers:

a)Father and son were walking through the woods and heard the sound of a wagon. Based on the information given in the previous answers, write your understanding of the text. b)The father reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty because it was making a lot of noise. The father and the son were walking and they heard a noise of a wagon. The father concluded that the wagon was empty because it was very noisy. The son learned that in life there are people who look like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite. The son compared the wagon with a person who has no love, lies and offends friends. In order not to be like an empty wagon, we have to be kind, loving, fond and not offend friends. c)He learned that, in life, there are people that look just like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite. d)It can have flaws, no love, no kindness and with lies, be rude and bad. e)To not be compared to an empty wagon, we have to be kind, loving, fond and not offend friends

a)Father and son were walking through the woods and heard the sound of a wagon.	Based on the information given in the previous answers, write your understanding of the text.
b)The father reached the conclusion that the wagon was empty because it was making a lot of noise.	The father and the son were walking and they heard a noise of a wagon. The father concluded that the wagon was empty because it was very noisy. The son learned that in life there are people who look like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite. The son compared the wagon with a person who has no love, lies and offends friends. In order not to be like an empty wagon, we have to be kind, loving, fond and not offend friends.
c)He learned that, in life, there are people that look just like an empty wagon, because they are rude, speak too much and are impolite.
d)It can have flaws, no love, no kindness and with lies, be rude and bad.
e)To not be compared to an empty wagon, we have to be kind, loving, fond and not offend friends

We verify that the student follows the teacher’s explanations for the production of the final response, and so he takes every conferred answers to interpretation questions and from the juxtaposition, sorts them into a new text. So the final answer shows the initial statement extracted from the text: “The father and the son were walking and they heard a noise of a wagon. The father concluded that the wagon was empty because it was very noisy.”; the explanation of this statement: “The son learned that an empty wagon is like an empty person. The empty person is too noisy, talks too much and interrupts” and exemplification of this explanation from the reader’s personal life elements: “In order not to be like an empty wagon, I have to be a good person, learn to listen and no to be rude”. To make a meaningful whole, the student needed to apply some linguistic adjustments: explain the first sentence subject from the third clause, rearrange the third clause to clarify the comparison brought by the text, mark his position with the use of the first plural person (“we are”; “we have”), eliminate words that express the same idea (“loving”), what evidences a reader that is in the process of building his reading and writing autonomy.

We believe that this structure crafted by the teacher became quite effective in the context of SAALP as it breaks with the fragmented work of reading and production responses in the classroom, in which the student is called to answer several questions, not always realizing the relationship between them and unable to reconstruct in it “the thought organization performed during the reading” (RODRIGUES, 2013, p. 63).

We found that some students disregarded the teacher’s explanations and guidance and paid attention to the command only: “Based on the information given in the previous answers, write your understanding of the text.”. Answers that only explain what the student understood about the text then emerged. For example: “I understood that an empty person has nothing of a good person, and because of that one has to give love and also the more bad things one does, the more this person is a sinner and one will also be sad and lonely” (L23).

So besides guiding students individually and collectively, one must offer an appropriate command to produce the final response. We consider that the question suggested by Menegassi (2010c, 2011), “What is the text about?”, is more appropriated for this work methodology.

Comparative results and final considerations

In order to make a better comparison between the teaching work with previous replies to collaborative action, without any interference from the theoretical or methodological research, and the work after collaborative actions, with theoretical and methodological support regarding the processes of reading and text production, we developed a comparative chart, from which we can visualize the progress made and the persisting gaps in working with the answers in SAALP.

Chart 3
– Comparative results

Planning

a) Before the collaborative actions: – discussions led by the teacher are not linked to the content of the text; – it is asked only to read aloud; there is no shared reading; – the meanings constructed by students from reading are not explored; – the oral questions require a single answer, which should be brief; – the questions offered to the answers production are replications of questions asked in the oral discussion of the text; – only interpretative questions are offered; – the questions are directed to the teacher’s intended interpretation – the stages of the reading process are disregarded; – no specific guidance on the textual genre regarding thematic content aspects, style and compositional construction are developed; – a basic assumption of critical reading is ignored: the interaction with the text.

b) After the collaborative actions – predictions about the text are stimulated; relations between the pre-reading and reading are established; however, the questions asked are not centered in the central ideas of the text; – a silent reading is requested; the guided reading is carried out, emphasizing the meanings of lexical items of the text; – no oral questions to verify the meanings constructed by the students are not performed; there is only one teacher’s explanation; – the teacher has difficulties to work and encourage counterwords by the student; – textual, inferential and interpretative response questions are provided; – the stages of the reading process are considered for the questions formulation; – the student is guided regarding the modality of the offered questions; – the student is guided concerning the compositional construction, requesting from him the complete answer.

IMPLEMENTATION

a) Before the collaborative action – students are not given guidance in order to perform the production of answers.

b) After the collaborative actions – guidance and intervention in the implementation of complete textual responses; – assistance to students understand the statement and select the information in the inferential and interpretative responses; – there is little emphasis on textual information, which led to difficulties in implementing the inferential and interpretative responses; – the necessary order of the questions is disregarded when guiding students.

REVIEW

a) Before the collaborative action It does not happen.

b) After the collaborative actions – it occurs during and after the implementation of the responses; – it is made from the teacher’s perspective; – different types of answers provide different points of view in the review process: in the textual responses the review shows the compositional structure of the genre; in the inferential and interpretative it shows the textual content; – the teacher draws attention to the problem in production; – the student is proposed to change his/her text; – the student is guided to use linguistic-discursive operations of the rewriting process, prioritizing the addition and replacement.

REWRITING

a) Before the collaborative action It does not occur.

b) After the collaborative actions – it arises from the changes suggested in the review stage; – the adding operation in rewriting implies further review; – there is some time for making the answers public.

• Source: Organized by researcher.

We see that some progress was made in the teacher’s conduction in dealing with the responses production process. There was closer relationship between the text and the student, fostered by the questions in the pre-reading phase, guided reading and the questions offered for the production of written responses. Thus, the reading after the collaborative actions was presented as a process of interaction between text and reader, unlike the practice before the collaborative actions, in which reading was seen only as decoding letters into sounds and a means of making the learner busy.

The procedures concerning working with Responses show the steps of textual production process - planning, implementation/execution, review and rewriting (Menegassi, 2010d), unlike the practice before the collaborative actions when some steps, though conceptually inherent to the process of production, were neglected.

From the work developed so far, some guidelines that are to be given for the conduction of textual production process of responses in SAALP could be delimited, starting from the assumption that the processes of reading and writing cannot be separated in the genre approach in classroom:

a)cause, in pre-reading step, student’s participation from the beginning of the process, emphasizing the main ideas of the text and thus enable the learner’s information progression and the production of answers, after reading the text;

b)establish relationships between pre-reading activities and reading;

c)ask the students silent reading, before reading aloud;

d)stimulate student’s reflective participation through shared reading practice;

e)provide discussions about the text content after reading;

f)lead students in the production of textual, inferential and interpretative answers through the questions linking them to the steps of the reading process;

g)work with textual answers to the questions throughout the reading process and not related to the beginning of the text only;

h)raise and discuss textual information with students, to enable them to have a deeper dialogue with the text and more active replicas;

i)when working with inferential answers, pay attention to the questions related to the pre-reading stage - the information location stage, as well as to the aid provided to the student during the reading process;

j)request the production of complete responses;

k)assist students on how to structure the answers in the process of answers production;

l)provide the revision and rewriting of the answers;

m)provide time for the dissemination of responses among students.

The analysis results point to the necessity of providing theoretical basis and methodological guidance to the SAALP teachers, when working with reading and writing, as well as provide monitoring and guidance to their practice in that particular teaching context, offering them a basis for rethinking the choices and their meaning concerning the proposed goals and objectives and student learning.

REFERÊNCIAS

• ANGELO, C. M. P.; MENEGASSI, R. J. Manifestações da compreensão responsiva na leitura. Linguagem & Ensino, Pelotas, v.14, n.1, p. 201-221, jan./jun. 2011. Disponível em: <http://www.rle.ucpel.tche.br/index.php/rle/article/view/14>. Acesso em: 04 abr. 2013.
  » http://www.rle.ucpel.tche.br/index.php/rle/article/view/14
• BAKHTIN, M. M. Estética da criação verbal Tradução do russo por Paulo Bezerra. 4. ed. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003.
• BAKHTIN, M.; VOLOCHINOV, V. N. Discurso na vida e discurso na arte (sobre poética sociológica). Tradução de Carlos Alberto Faraco e Cristóvão Tezza [para fins didáticos]. Versão da língua inglesa de I. R. Titunik a partir do original russo. New York: Academic Press, 1976.
• BAKHTIN, M.; VOLOCHINOV, V. N. Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Tradução do francês por Michel Lahud e Yara Frateschi Vieira. 9. ed. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1999.
• BARROS, D. L. P. Dialogismo, polifonia, enunciação. In: BARROS, D. L. P.; FIORIN, J. L. (Org.). Dialogismo, polifonia, intertextualidade São Paulo: EDUSP, 2003. p.01-09.
• GERALDI, J. W. Portos de passagem São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1993.
• MAGALHÃES, M. C. C. A linguagem na formação de professores como profissionais reflexivos e críticos. In: MAGALHÃES, M. C. C. (Org.). A formação do professor como um profissional crítico Campinas: Mercado das Letras, 2004. p. 59-85.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. Produção, ordenação e sequenciação de perguntas na avaliação de leitura. In: CENTURION, R.; CRUZ, M.; BATISTA, I. M. (Org). Linguagem e(m) interação-Línguas, literaturas e educação Cáceres-MT: Ed. Unemat, 2011. p. 17-35.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. Estratégias de leitura. In: MENEGASSI, R. J. (Org.). Leitura e ensino 2.ed. Maringá: Eduem, 2010a. p.41-63.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. Avaliação de leitura. In: MENEGASSI, R. J. (Org.). Leitura e ensino. 2.ed. Maringá: Eduem, 2010b. p.87-106.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. Perguntas de leitura. In: MENEGASSI, R. J. (Org.). Leitura e ensino. 2.ed. Maringá: Eduem, 2010c. p.167-189.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. O leitor e o processo de leitura. In: GRECO, E. A.; GUIMARÃES, T. B. (Org.). Leitura: aspectos teóricos e práticos. Maringá: Eduem, 2010d. p.35-59.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. O processo de produção textual. In: SANTOS, A. R. dos; GRECO, E. A.; GUIMARÃES, T. B. (Org.). A produção textual e o ensino Maringá: Eduem, 2010e. p.75-101.
• MENEGASSI, R. J. Da revisão à reescrita: operações e níveis lingüísticos na construção do texto. 1998. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística) - Faculdade de Ciências e Letras de Assis, Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, Assis, 1998.
• PRUPEST, F. M. V. Questão discursiva: espaço de produção da leitura e da escrita do gênero. Educere et Educare, Cascavel, v. 2, n. 3, p. 165-181, 2007.
• RODRIGUES, A. Perguntas de leitura e construção de sentidos: experiência com o 6º ano do Ensino Fundamental. 2013. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras) – Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Maringá, 2013.
• ROJO, R. Letramentos múltiplos, escola e inclusão social São Paulo: Parábola, 2009.
• SILVA, A. M. da. O tema como constitutivo do gênero resposta interpretativa: um estudo da responsividade. In: COLÓQUIO INTERNACIONAL DE ESTUDOS LINGUÍSTICOS E LITERÁRIOS, 1. ; COLÓQUIO DE ESTUDOS LINGUÍSTICOS E LITERÁRIOS, 4., 2010, Maringá. Anais.. Maringá: Universidade Estadual de Maringá, 2010. Disponível em: <http://www.cielli.com.br/downloads/382.pdf>. Acesso em: 01 ago. 2013.
  » http://www.cielli.com.br/downloads/382.pdf
• SOLÉ, I. Estratégias de leitura Tradução de Claudia Schilling. Porto Alegre: Ed. Artmed, 1998.
• TAGLIEBER, L. K.; PEREIRA, C. M. Atividades de pré-leitura. Gragoatá, Niterói, v.2, p.73-92, 1997.

• 1
  Source: http://www.gestaoescolar.diaadia.pr.gov.br/modules/conteudo/conteudo.php?conteudo=28. Acess in 20 may 2013.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Sep-Dec 2016

History

• Received
  Sept 2014
• Accepted
  Jan 2015