LEXICAL CHOICE IN PAIRED WRITING

Oral Erasure, Unfolded Commenting and Metalinguistic Activity in children’s textualization

Abstract

This article investigates how metalinguistic activity in the semantic-lexical domain emerges during children’s collaborative writing. Since research on spontaneous processes of lexical reflection remains limited – largely confined to elicitation protocols that displace the student from the position of “author in action” – this study follows a dyad of second-grade primary school students across ten processes of producing invented etiological tales. The approach integrates Textual Genetics and Benveniste’s theory of enunciation, drawing on the Ramos System protocol, which synchronizes audio and graphic records, making it possible to grasp the manuscript in statu nascendi. Sixteen semantic-lexical textual objects and thirty unfolded comments were identified, organized along a continuum of metalinguistic explicitness ranging from lexical definition and comparison to description of the referent. Self-glossing stood out as a gesture of lexical retention that constitutes the most explicit form of oral erasure. The two students displayed complementary modes of functioning: one through autonomous definition, the other through dialogical confrontation. We conclude that lexical reflection is constitutive of the act of writing, even when it leaves no graphic traces.