Histórico de letramento e práticas letradas em redações de vestibular.

Abstract

With the advancement of technologies and the development of society, the diffusion of multiliteracy has increased considerably. Taking into consideration that the college entrance examination tends to generate a retroactive effect in its participants, and that each candidate who takes the exam has a particular literacy history ( LH ), we attempted through this research to reach three objectives: (1) to check the literacy practices required by the composition test applied at the regular and special college entrance exams for the Federal University of Campina Grande, in the year 2007; (2) to investigate the LH of those candidates who were successful and those who were not successful with the literacy practices required by the composition tests; (3) to analyse the relationship between the mobilization of literacy practices both in the compositions and in the candidates’ LH. This research is descriptive-interpretative, of qualitative nature, whose corpus was composed of four data sets, namely: (1) composition tests applied at the regular and special college entrance exams, held at the Federal University of Campina Grande in 2007; (2) samples of compositions produced during these exams; (3) a socio-economic and cultural questionnaire answered by the candidates, and (4) an semi-structured interview done with them. With this in mind, we used a procedure called data triangulation, by means of which the we triangled the information from the corpus. The data, analysed on the basis of present-day studies on literacy ( cf. BARTON 7 HAMILTON, 2000; GEE, 2000; MEY, 2001; BAZERMAN, 2007), show the presence of multiliteracy in the tests, and also indicate that the candidates’ LH seems to be a decisive factor for the mobilization of literacy practices in the writing of compositions. The candidates who demonstrated the practices required by the college entrance examination were probably familiar with literacy events whose practices were similar to those required by the event present in the exam paper, whereas those who did not perform them well may have had more experience with school literacy. Thus, the results have shown that school practices appear to be insufficient for the candidates to demonstrate the multiliterate practices required by the exam, since literacies such as the mediatic and literary ones also underlie this event. Therefore, these results show the influence of the candidates’ LH on the composition writing exam, confirming the very core of present-day studies on literacy - a subject’s life history is one of the elements which interfere in the mobilization of literate practices from one event to another.