The effects of assisted teaching on the students’ concept mobilizing writing of Portuguese Phonetics and Phonology discipline

Abstract

This article aims to demonstrate the changes in the concept-mobilizing writing of students during Phonetics and Phonology of the Portuguese Language’ course (LET0420) at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte. The assistance for students’ writing was carried out in the context of an assisted teaching project. One of the activities developed during the project was correction and consequent rewriting of texts. Two core problems were perceived in the texts received: (i) the difficulty of explaining, demonstrating and exemplifying concepts linked to the content and (ii) the constant recurrence, in the students' productions, of a crystallized form of writing or even filling the gaps, without authorship. The ineffective mobilization of concepts and the insistence on a specific template writing has the consequence of distancing students from an academic writing form and from appropriation of studied concepts. As a way of solving these problems, we highlight two strategies applied in moments of monitoring: (i) individually point out the excerpts lacking conceptual coherence, and (ii) suggest new textual organizations that dispense with the mandatory dissertation-argumentative template. To demonstrate the application of such strategies, two productions by two students were selected – totaling four response texts. The second response text consists of the post-monitoring production that is analyzed to attest and systematize the changes in the students' writing. The result attested in the students' writing was the abandonment of the non-academic textual mold and the improvement in the mobilization of concepts from Articulatory Phonetics and Structural Phonology.