O discurso sobre a língua no ENEM: estratégias de controle/regulagem da heterogeneidade.

Abstract

ENEM (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio) was an exam created in the 1990s amidst a socio-political transformation context that attributed significative weight to education as an instrument of professional qualification. For such, through ENEM, high-school students are evaluated. Nowadays, besides certifying the completion of this education level, the exam is also an instrument of access to many universities. Considering its reach, which mobilizes approximately six million participants and possibly influences the practice of many teachers, we propose to understand, according to a Frenchfocused Discourse Analysis: What control/regulation of language and its heterogeneity’s discursive strategies maintain the Portuguese Language polemic discourse running in ENEM? Assuming that there is a tense relationship between discourses composing the discourse of our corpus, we established as General Objective: Analyzing how the discourse about language and its heterogeneity is constructed in ENEM’s Portuguese Language questions. The specific objectives are: Identifying the theoretical discourses that constitute ENEM’s questions about language and its heterogeneity; Recognizing the meanings’ effects about language and its heterogeneity in the different “signification spaces” of these questions; and Discussing how these meanings’ effects maintain a control/regulation of language and its heterogeneity’s policy. In the attempt to reach these objectives, we took as analysis units Portuguese Language questions from 2009 through 2013 editions of the exam. To achieve our objectives, we resorted to Discourse Analysis as a theoreticmethodological tool. This option was made because we believe that language representations can be better comprehended if we resort to some discourseperspective postulates. In face of a national high-school evaluation exam that (re)produces images about language, our research is justified because of the need to critically comprehend the signification processes that constitute the discourses and its meanings’ filiations when analyzing the discourse relationships between language heterogeneity/homogeneity. Among the main conclusions of the investigation perpetrated, we noticed that, albeit intending to enclose heterogenic images of the language, the language discourse in ENEM exams is tense, conflictual, and pervaded by discourses that represent language/heterogeneity from conflictual relationships trampled on a game of/between unitary/different meanings. There is, thus, a meaning crossing in/from the polemic discourse running about Portuguese Language in the exam.