Literacy, Discourse and the Production of Social Senses: Dimensions and Guidelines for Research and for Teaching Writing

Abstract

This paper presents data from a recently finished research that outlines dimensions and guidelines for what has been named discursive perspective on literacy. Principles of the theory of enunciation (Bakhtin's Circle) and studies that analyze the relationships between subject and language as well as the role of discursive interactions in the teaching and learning processes, organize the theoretical and methodological basis of the study. We analyzed reports written by five literacy teachers for 18 months. Two theoretical-methodological dimensions of analysis were employed, the discursive and the evidential. We focus on the ways the pedagogical practice is developed in the classroom, seeking for indexes to describe the discursive situation from which they were collected, and to analyze and interpret them. The aim of the research was to understand how to construct literacy methodologies in which working with children's lives in written culture overcomes the traditional work focused on the writing system.