Oliveira, Maria Bernadete Fernandes deGalvão, Sylvia Coutinho Abbott2019-01-142019-01-142018-08-03GALVÃO, Sylvia Coutinho Abbott. Do castelo de Périgord à academia: ensaiando o gênero ensaio na UFRN. 2018. 193f. Tese (Doutorado em Estudos da Linguagem) - Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, 2018.https://repositorio.ufrn.br/jspui/handle/123456789/26497The essay has resisted to all theorizing attempts. Many scholars consider this a multifaceted genre, a no-genre, and anti-genre and even an ‘outlaw genre’, situated outside the norms and the literary institution. With such formal and content freedom, but consolidated for its canonical irreverence, how was it that, being inserted in the academic sphere, the essay negotiated a space as rigorous as any scientific orthodoxy? Is it possible to establish a stylistic-compositional matrix for the academic/scientific essay? And, to what extent, a curricular practice of essay writing at the university level, made viable through a didactic sequence (DOLZ; NOVERRAZ; SCHNEUWLY, 2004), would serve as a mediating element between knowing and doing for university students in their initial formation as researchers. Seeking answers to these questions, in this thesis, the following objectives have been forwarded: 1) to delineate the configuration of the academic essay genre (in the letters/linguistic area), considering its contents, selection of expressive resources (verbal style) and compositional structure. This will be done in view of the analysis of essays that have been published by experienced researchers and senior academics. And 2) to investigate and evaluate (having the mentioned essays as parameters) the incorporation of discursive and enunciation structures of the genre by beginners in the academic community (undergraduate students in Letters). The essays authored by the referred students were written as part of a didactics procedure in a specific elective discipline (Reading and writing academic texts II) offered in the degree curriculum of the Letters and Linguistics Course in Portuguese Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). In order to reach the announced objectives, an operational concept of essay was established considering the analysis of eight academic essays written by renowned Brazilian researchers. Having this concept as reference, the corpus of the research, consisting of four pairs of essays, written by four undergraduate pursuing the Letters major, was analysed. Four of these texts were written in the beginning of the didactic sequence; the other four were written towards the end of the process. Regarding its theoretical standing, this thesis draws on the postulates of the Bakhtinian Circle (concepts of language, speech genres, dialogism); on the postulates of Sociodiscursive Interactionism (construction of didactics sequences), and on the New Literacy Studies (literacy as social practices). In methodological terms, the research is based on the interpretivist approach and the qualitative paradigm; it is an action research of social-empirical nature. An analysis of the corpus reveals that, in developing a practice of reading and essay writing, a didactic sequence, focusing on the essay, transforms the students’ initial assumptions regarding the genre. More than that, it shows that students acquire knowledge of the genre’s stylisticcompositional configuration, thus allowing their rightful engagement in academic writing.Acesso AbertoEnsaioGêneros acadêmicosSequência didáticaEscrita acadêmicaLetramento acadêmicodoctoralThesisCNPQ::LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA