Oral Genres in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Proposal Beyond Private Communication

• Main Author: Fernando Alves de Oliveira
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Essentia Editora IFFluminense 2016-04-01
• Series: Vértices
• Subjects: Orality. Opinion Debate. Formal Oral Genres.
• Online Access: http://essentiaeditora.iff.edu.br/index.php/vertices/article/view/5946

<p>Orality is forgotten by the school as a legitimate form of language and work strategy with the language. Still predominate in school practices related to writing, a reminiscence of the pedagogical tradition that spread, among others, the false idea that, because most of them are related to daily practices and reflect the ability to speak, we have acquired from an early age, oral genres don’t need to be studied. It is observed that, when teachers work with these genres, they do not focus their evaluation on characteristics of the orality in the texts produced. The direction is only for exhibition content, without take into account the linguistic and contextual adjustments that the speaker should do, according to the formality of situation inherent to that act of communication. In many cases, when students speak in class, they are not encouraged to reflect on that linguistic usage, need that demonstrates the inconsistency of the work done by many teachers. It is clear, however, that it is up to school provide tools to speakers to fulfill the oral communicative demands of day-to-day, especially in formal contexts, that go beyond the limits of private communication (chat, exchange ideas, explanation to the neighboring colleague). Oral competence of use of the Portuguese should be developed from the period of literacy, when children need to distinguish between what they already know and use in terms of language and the systematization of linguistic work that the school should provide. From this perspective, opinion debate, as a legitimate social practice, embodied in actual use situations of language, permeated by discursive formulations of all sorts and raises the collective production of oral texts, is a genre that promotes the teaching and learning of orality in formal mode. Privileges also argumentative skills in the discursive perspective, because mobilizes development structures of arguments related to the form of construction of sentences, choice of linguistic mechanisms, theme development strategies, among others. This research, exploratory and qualitative, with direct intervention in the classroom reality, was materialized by performing an Opinion Debate (DOLZ; SCHNEWULY; PIETRO 2004) in a class of 9th grade of a state school in João Pessoa (PB). The event was preceded by a set of activities involving oral genres, based on the didactic sequence model proposed by Dolz, Noverraz and Schneuwly (2004), which culminated in a debate with the theme "Marijuana: Keep Prohibitions or Decriminalize" . With the intervention in the classroom, we believe we have contributed for students to understand and could produce texts appropriate to the genre in question, considering its style, subject content and compositional structure (Bakhtin, 1997), and also had developed his argumentative skills.</p>