Contar, ouvir e escrever: o relato pessoal como estratégia para a motivação e o desenvolvimento da escrita

Abstract

Daily in the Portuguese language classes, we notice a significant number of students unmotivated to develop reading, writing, and rewriting text activities. The present Master's thesis titled “Telling, listening and writing: the personal report as a strategy for the motivation and development of writing”, came from our concern in the face of the reality, we realized that the absence of meaning in most situations of oral and written textual productions in the school environment concur to an undeveloped language skill of the students on proficient writing. This fact has caused discomfort and concern, and it made us look for scientific paths to propose a pedagogical intervention that would help us to deal with one of the great challenges in the teaching practice of the Portuguese language: awaken the motivation of students to get interested and perceive the meaning of learning to write. Therefore, our general objective was presenting the results of a proposal and application of pedagogical intervention, working with the personal report genre as an amplifier of the motivation for writing students of the 6th year of Elementary School of E.E. Antônio Job da Cruz in Vila Nova Floresta, Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais state. We started from the assumption that an interventional work with the genre personal report, using appropriate methodological strategies, could constitute an efficient and important motivation tool for written production, as studies indicate, the opportunity to write about oneself tends to generate greater involvement of students in activities; a fact that would certainly help students to build meanings for their learning, as well as for the improvement of writing skills not only in the reports but also in other textual genres. In the development of this study, we used theoretical and methodological assumptions from Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 1996), among others; action research (THIOLLENT, 2011) and from ethnographic research (GARCEZ and SCHULZ, 2015). We developed studies around motivation and its influence on written production (RYAN and DECY, 2000) among other researchers. We reflected on textual genres (MARCUSCHI, 2008; BAKTHIN, 2016) relating them to other themes that enriched and substantiated our work. So, the research here presented was developed in two stages: the investigative-diagnosis, which pointed out the most relevant aspects in the initial production of the personal report that aroused greater attention, leading us to the elaboration of an action plan to interfere positively in that reality. The second stage was the investigative-interventional, in which the theoretical- methodological foundations led us to adapt and safely develop the actions proposed in that plan. This allowed us to monitor, through data collected in diagnostics, as well as in observation, the growing involvement of research participants in writing and textual rewriting activities mediated by motivational notes. As a result of the intervention, we found that aspects of the written text, such as punctuation marks, paragraphing, use of referential expressions, among others, started to be used more autonomously by the participants. In conclusion, this study represents a scientific contribution to the academic community and teachers who seek possibilities in the teaching/learning of the Portuguese language, as its results pointed out the effectiveness of personal reporting as a textual genre capable of increasing motivation for students' written production in the 6th year of elementary school, thus contributing to the development of writing skills while helping to strengthen the identity of their authors.