Seminários acadêmicos: concepções e estratégias didático-discursivas.

Abstract

The seminar is a formal oral event, placed into an evaluative literate practice, with welldefined steps and rhetorical units which conduct the exposure to reach one’s objective. For this reason, it involves interactions, proper posture of those involved, diverse genres and strategies of knowledge building, configuring it as something planned provided that it is designed and organized by the group for the implementation of content, but it is also subject to the dynamics of orality and the universe of the classroom. Accordingly, the realization of this practice in higher education, specifically in the education of Portuguese teachers, contributes to the development of the communicative competence of the participants and formulates flexible strategies of teaching practice, both with respect to its content and praxis. In this context, this thesis aims to contribute to the study of formal speaking skills through further reflection on the seminar in the academic context, providing support for an interactive and efficient work with the event, and, specifically: a) To identify the concepts of academic seminar that guide the practice and discourse of those involved; b) To describe the didactic and discursive strategies underlying the act of those involved (teacher and students); c) To relate the use of didactic and discursive strategies in mobilizing knowledge at the moment of oral exposure. In order to reach the objectives we seek to answer the following research questions: Which concept(s) regarding the academic seminar underlie the practice taking place? and How do the didactic and discursive strategies in the different phases of the academic seminar show the mobilization of knowledge?; in harmony with the concepts of the seminar, according to Dolz and Schneuwly (2004), Vieira (2007), Silva (2007), Goulart (2010) and Meira and Silva (2013), didactic and discursive strategies, according to Barros (1999), Matencio (2001) and Aparicio (2001) and communicative competence by Hymes (1972). The methodology employed is ethnographic and descriptive-interpretative, following the procedure of participant and systematic observation of the moments of implementation and evaluation of ten seminars as part of the curriculum component of Reading Practice and Text Production II (PLPT II), offered by the course of Letters at the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG), during the second semester of the 2010 school year. The data analysis reveals that the action and speech on the part of seminarians is limited to technical concepts, while the teacher, based on Socio-Discursive Interactionism (SDI), comprises the seminar as literate practice, developed in the stages of planning, execution and evaluation. As for didactic and discursive strategies, we find actions related to interaction and resolution of the question, with emphasis on reformulation and resumption as the main operations, thus mobilizing the stylistic knowledge; and with respect to the praxis, we perceived strategies in using the material and producing interaction, which resulted in the mobilization of linguistic, pragmatic and textual knowledge. These identifications testified limitations in the fulfillment of tasks applied during the assessment, and the necessary relationship between theoretical and methodological knowledge for achieving the objective of the seminar.