Aspectos da transitividade em textos argumentativos de alunos de inglês: um estudo sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

This qualiquantitative study analyzes lexicogrammatical choices realized in 18 written texts from the Discussion genre produced by nine students of a language institute at a federal university in Northeastern Brazil. The texts were generated in a Level IV English class and in a conversation class in two moments in 2015.2 and submitted to a qualitative analysis by using the transitivity system proposed by systemic-functional linguistics (HALLIDAY, 1994; EGGINS, 2004; HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014). In the quantitative analysis, we used the Wordsmith Tools 5.0 (SCOTT, 2010) program to identify and quantify the processes and the participants of the clauses. The results show that the most frequent processes in the level IV class were is/are, like and have whereas the most frequent processes in the conversation class were is/are, think, and do. In the first class, the process like suggests that the students conceive the subjects in question as matters of personal preference while, in the second class, the process think reveals the interpretation of the themes as matters of personal beliefs. Regarding the participants in the clauses, the more frequent recurrences in the level IV class were people, weekend, I and we, while we, waste, problem, garbage, you and women were more recurrent in the conversation class. The recurrent use of I in the first class shows the strategy of the students in revealing themselves as authors to express their opinions. On the other hand, in the second class, the use of you consists of a strategy to call the reader’s attention directly. These results show that the identification and the analysis of participants and processes in the clauses by means of transitivity are useful feedback for the students when rewriting or producing new texts.