Metacognitive knowledge, frameworks of text meaning construction, and Portuguese teaching-learning

Abstract

This paper proposes the concept of frameworks for meaning construction in written texts, related to the dimensions of people’s experiences expressed in lexicalgrammatical text structure: genre, register, field, tenor and modality. It is possible to observe that these frameworks in the analysis of an argumentative essay, which does not correspond to any of the expected frameworks for the type of text required. The same text is presented to 80 High School students, and their comments reveal the level of quality of their metalinguistic knowledge: an understanding of language which is limited to the word level; to the perception of register, but not of other frameworks; to the limitation to linearsuperficial text aspects: to orthography, punctuation etc.; and to the textual perspective as object-language, and not metalanguage. From these facts, we proceed to some claims about the current conditions of teaching and learning of Brazilian students’ mother tongue in Brazil, by taking into consideration the knowledge that they have been constructing about language.