Opinion article: an enunciative-discursive perspective

Abstract

The central question guiding this study stems from the following premise: How does the student position himself as an author and understand argumentation and discursive referencing as strategies for maintaining the text’s meaning? How do students position themselves as authors and understand argumentation and discursive referencing as strategies for maintaining the text’s meaning? The objectives are: 1) to discuss how the process of discursive referencing occurs as a linguistic materiality in the production of meaning; and 2) to analyze markers of appropriateness to the discursive genre, thematic maintenance and progression, and authorship. Regarding the study design, eight stages were implemented with 9th-grade students enrolled in a public school in the city of Rio Verde, Goiás, focusing on the opinion article as a discursive genre, as our primary goal was to develop the students’ interactive-discursive competence. The theoretical and methodological framework is based on Textual-Interactionist Linguistics (Cavalcante, 2013); (Koch, 2015), at the intersection with Applied Linguistics (Geraldi, 1997, 2012) and a deconstructive discursive approach (Coracini, 1995, 2011). The results indicated that, despite some difficulties, there was progress in the students’ writing, as they produced opinion pieces that articulated the interactive process of reading, in accordance with the guidelines provided by the professor-researcher. In the second writing assignment, we observed subjective discursive markers, indicating that the students had overcome difficulties in textual comprehension and were able to produce more consistent argumentative-discursive statements.