The meaning of words and how they relate to the ongoing text: A study of semantic comments made by two 7-year-old schoolchildren

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the semantic comments made by a dyad of newly literate students (6 to 8 years), during writing processes in real time. Affiliated to the field of studies proposed by the Textual Genetics, from an enunciative approach, we treat as a unit of analysis the Dialogical Text (DT) established in face-to-face interaction, respecting their multimodal dimension (gestures, expressions, body movements) and spontaneous speech and co-enunciation of the students in pairs. The DT constitutes the recognition by one of the speakers of Textual Objects (TO) and comments related to these objects. The relationship between the TO and recognized semantic comments is defined as a type of Commented Oral Erasure (COE).Our analysis was based on a data set composed by the filmic record of 16 writing process stories invented by the same dyad of students. We discussed the occurrence of this type of COE in 3 writing processes. Our results indicate that the semantic comments directed to OT aimed at the establishment of textual unit, indicating how the students were thinking about this problem for the manuscript in progress. The relationship between the TO and uttered semantic comments mapped the genesis and the textual creation process. Moreover, the semantic COE show the students’ linguistic and textual knowledge that are not possible to identify in the finished manuscript.