A READING OF INTERACTIONIST ORAL NARRATIVES PRODUCED BY CHILDREN 1ST YEAR OF ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Abstract

ABSTRACT

The objective of this work is to verify the presence of narrative in students’ and teacher’s speech in the first year of elementary school. This research involved a group from the first year of a municipal school in Vitória da Conquista (BA) during one semester. The audio[1]recorded observations were held weekly and focused on situations in which either the teacher or the students told or read a story. Initially, I present the cognitive conception that guided my work as a speech therapist and my research proposal upon entering the master's program in linguistics from UESB, which was focused on the semantic categorization of linguistic signs in the narrative of children from the last stage of early childhood education and the early years of elementary school. I also describe the change occurred due to guided readings from the Masters’ program about the interactionist approach to language acquisition. In the first two chapters of this work I present a brief discussion on this theory, picking up some key concepts: the dialogue as the unit of analysis (DE LEMOS, 2002), changes in the child's position in the structure of language (DE LEMOS, 1992; BOSCO, 2005; PEREIRA DE CASTRO & FIGUEIRA, 2006; LIER-DE VITTO & CARVALHO, 2008), the question of the proper order of language (SAUSSURE, 1916/2006; DE LEMOS, 1995), position of the researcher (CARVALHO, 2005, 2006), studies on the status of linguistic and discursive narrative in child’s speech (PERRONI, 1992, DE LEMOS, 2001, SALEH, 2004). In the third chapter, I present an analysis of dialogic episodes occurred between the teacher and students around the ECA document and the wonderful tale “João e Maria”, and also the writing / drawings produced by students. Regarding the dialogic episodes, the teacher’s role is to refer students to texts they are familiar with and recap what they say, when there is no coincidence in terms of the argumentative direction expected by her, thus resulting in the expansion of their discursive universe. Based on that, the texts brought by the students reveal language movements in their speech – the accomplishment of metaphoric and metonymic processes - which gain textuality through the teacher's speech. The individual narratives of eleven children, as from drawings, indicate that narrative instances - narrator, characters, author - work by the effect of the text on those children as the effect of the text on the text itself. In some of the students’ narratives there is intervention from other texts which are not related to the story, and because they are not re-signified they reveal gaps in the textual tissue. One of the conclusions of this work relates to issues brought by the interactionism which could be inferred even in the broader interaction context of the classroom: the subject who comes as an effect of language and the role of the other’s speech/texts in this constitution.