Escrevendo no Contexto: Contribuições da LSF Para o Ensino de Redação Acadêmica *

Désirée MOTTA-ROTH
(Universidade Federal de Santa Maria)

ABSTRACT: Newcomers to academia in Brazil, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels, often find writing research genres an impossible task. Previous well known studies have been developed on the structural aspects of academic genres (e.g., Swales) or the pragmatics of written interaction in academic texts (e.g., Myers). However few studies have concentrated on the contributions of SFL to the actual academic writing teaching practice as a framework to help junior scholars better understand academic discourse and the academic context. Leaving aside the most abstract aspects of SFL, in this paper I would like to focus on the very initial level of theoretization in SFL and perhaps the most concrete aspect of the theory, namely the way the context can be recreated by analysis of language and vice versa. The presentation aims at pointing out some practical implications derived from applications of SFL to the teaching of academic writing and understanding of the academic context. I will try to explore writing teaching activities in connection to the three dimensions of context - field, tenor, and mode – and their respective metafunctions – ideational, interpersonal, and textual. Two simple (and to a certain extent obvious) arguments will be put forth in the form of activities: first, in order for students to become writers in their field they have to become discourse analysts (to produce the texts that are adequate to the discipline at the ideational, interpersonal and textual levels they must learn to read these texts); and second, in a crossdisciplinary classroom, some basic SFL principles can be productively used in teaching materials to help students from different fields realize how language works from a sociointeractionist perspective.

* Artigo produzido com o apoio de Bolsa PQ/CNPq nº 304256/2004-8, como parte do Projeto “Categorias analíticas e procedimentos metodológicos em análise crítica de gêneros discursivos”. Agradeço aos membros do Grupo de Pesquisa/CNPq “Linguagem como Prática Social” por debater esse texto comigo, especialmente a Francieli Rodrigues (Mestrado/UFSM) pelas sugestões e a Graciela Rabuske Hendges, colega na UFSM, pelas correções feitas no manuscrito. Os erros que ainda persistirem são de minha responsabilidade.