O uso de operadores argumentativos em artigos de opinião: uma intervenção com alunos do 9º ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

Written language in the condition of interactive activity requires mobilization of various knowledges, use of linguistic strategies and procedures involved in the construction of the meanings of the text. Thereupon, the study presents a proposal of pedagogical intervention aiming at the improvement of the writing skills of the 9th grade students of a public school in the municipality of Parnamirim/RN. Intending to train these students to better articulate their arguments when producing texts of the genre opinion article, we worked with the argumentative operators, aiming to investigate the use of these linguistic elements in opinion articles produced by such students, in order to identify the argumentative operators used in textual productions, to verify their use and variation in the texts produced and to analyse if these elements articulate the arguments in function of the communicative purpose intended by the student. These are indispensable elements to the good argumentation, since they guide the interlocutor towards a certain conclusion, directing thus to the view held by the subject that speaks. With the aim of understanding and thereby interfere in the use of argumentative operators, in the opinion articles produced by the students, we conducted an action research, of a qualitative nature, applying the teaching sequence procedure proposed by Dolz, Noverraz and Schneuwly (2004). Such methodology allowed us to work with students the use of argumentative operators in real communication situations, as recommended by the National Curricular Parameters for the teaching of Portuguese Language. We chose the production of opinion articles because it is a predominantly argumentative textual genre, so that the students perceived the pertinence of those elements and their effectiveness in speech and thus could use them more properly when defending a certain point of view. For this, we dialogued with theoretical contributions of Textual Linguistics and Argumentative Semantics. We based ourselves in the studies of Koch (2005, 2011, 2013), Marcuschi (2002, 2008), Schneuwly (2004), Schneuwly and Dolz (2004), Bakhtin (2003) as well as Antunes (2005, 2009, 2010, 2014) and Guimarães (1987), among other authors. We noticed, at the end of this action research, that the use of argumentative operators, in the opinion articles produced by our students, began to better serve the communicative purposes, since once employed in a more articulated way, they showed a better appropriation of these linguistic elements and their effective employment, providing the discursive relations, manifested in the textual fabric, a more coherent argument and, therefore, with greater convincing power.