Letramento acadêmico: o resumo como instrumento potencializador do desenvolvimento da escrita universitária

Abstract

This research is in the field of Linguistic Studies, in the research line of Applied Linguistics, of the Postgraduate Program in Literature at the Federal University of Tocantins. The general objective of this study was to investigate, in a class of students from the initial periods of undergraduate (1st to 4th), how textual production, through the academic abstract genre, can contribute to their development of academic literacy, from the Portuguese and Literature undergraduate course in a public and federal university in the state of Tocantins. Specifically, we aimed: to understand the concept of the writing of the researched students and its implications in the process of textual production; to investigate the linguistic-discursive marks that constitute the action (authorship) of these students in the production of the academic abstract; to analyze how the process of guided rewriting (feedbacks) contributes to the development of writing competence. The main problem that triggered our interest in the study comes from a disagreement with the reproduction of the discourse, recurrent in academia, that college students, especially those from initial periods, "write poorly / are illiterate" or that they would not be prepared to access higher education (BATISTA-SANTOS, 2017). This is a research with a qualitative-interpretative approach in Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 2006) that starts from a social perspective of literacy and it is based on the theoretical assumptions of the New Literacy Studies (LEA and STREET, 1998; KLEIMAN, 1995, 2013; SOARES, 2009; STREET, 2014 and others) consolidated in the 1990s. Aligned with the theoretical assumptions of Bakhtin (2011) and his Circle (VOLÓCHINOV, 2018), we consider language as interaction and the enunciates/discourses through the lens of dialogism and crossed by sociocultural and ideological aspects. Thus, based on the three Bakhtinian dimensions: thematic content, compositional construction, and style, we analyze academic abstracts produced by the researched students of the academic subject "Reading and production of academic texts" as well as we applied a questionnaire to these students to understand their writing practices in basic education, that is, we sought to understand the students' literacy before their entrance at the university, seeking to demonstrate the reflection of this to academic literacy in higher education. The results show the students' difficulties regarding academic textual production in this new teaching environment; point out that university writing can be improved or developed through the process of writing and rewriting the academic abstract genre, and that the professors' feedback is an important teaching strategy, since it enables students to reflect on their discursive achievements in academic writing.