Composition writing at school: what teachers say and silence about

Abstract

The concern with writing at elementary school instigated us to carry out a large study to investigate elementary school teachers’ discourse about their students related to composition writing, that is, how teachers imagine their students’ writing processes. Our corpus is selected from an ample field of discourse. Discursive sequences of reference were selected from cut-outs from written statements by approximately thirty elementary school teachers from Brazilian public schools. This investigation adopts the perspective of French Discourse Analysis, the Socio-Historical Theory of Literacy, Freud and Lacan’s Psychoanalysis and in the Science of Education. Our results show that: a) teachers focus more on what they imagine to be students’ flaws and gaps of knowledge, and less on students’ cumulated knowledge; b) teachers do not see themselves as professionals capable of dealing with what they presume to be students’ difficulties related to writing; c) some students’ oral discourse is not acknowledged nor valued by teachers; d) teachers imagine some students to be at level zero of literacy as they start their schooling. We believe there can be a teachers’ subscription into a discursive formation which allowed them to imagine their students as subjects who start school with some literacy background. With that in mind, teachers might develop a teaching practice considering discursive memory, students’ memories and their meanings, leading them to identify with their original meanings. We see it as urgent that narrative discourse is incorporated to teaching practices and contents in elementary schools. Among other possibilities, the narrative discourse allows students to express their subjectivity. That is a fundamental condition to make sense of their own discourse, from the perspective of historicized-interpreter, and to become authors of their own speech. We believe that pre-service courses for teachers have an important role in offering writing experience for those learning to teach. We advocate the mastering of knowledge related to writing encourages differentiation among students, assuring them greater participation in social practices.