Applied linguistics of the Portuguese language

Research Projects:

 

Writing and academic literacy: study concept and other forwardings to teaching and research

Description: This project includes topics whose deepening have required, within the academic literacy problems, longer-lasting attention in studies developed by me, alongside other more recent themes: (a) about the literacy/orality relation regarding the conception of writing that guides the production of these texts; (b) about dialogical relations, of time/space and temporality/spatiality, which are at the basis of the conceptions of utterance, discourse gender, text, and discourse; (c) about the process of literacy in the context of student’s education for teaching (future teachers) and research (future researcher); and (d) the one about the elaboration of study concepts for teaching, understood as teaching instruments made from any of the dimensions of language with the purpose of providing for students elements for reflection and intervention on their own writing. The objective of the current research is to investigate how the academic literacy process occurs, noting, in particular, how the development of writing (and reading) of pre-university and university students (undergraduates and graduate students) occurs, proposing, from this, forwardings for work in the classroom. The material available for analysis consists of texts produced by students at different times of their school lives and in different situations. The database, set up since 2001, is composed of material collected in three situations: (a) evaluation; (b) classes; and (c) editing for publication. Are part of the texts produced in situation of evaluation: 3363 responses to the discursive issue of Languages and Literature and Linguistics, number correspondent to about 20% of the total number of responses obtained in the analysis of 2001; 270 essays on the subject Study, produced by candidates of the Languages and Literature program of the University of São Paulo on the occasion of the admission exam FUVEST/2006; and 307 essays on the subject Borders, produced by candidates to different programs of the University of São Paulo on the occasion of the admission exam FUVEST/2009. The material produced in class (the researcher was also the professor) was collected during the year of 2013 and gathers: 79 texts obtained in the panel (or poster) teaching process by students of the first year of the Languages and Literature program (daytime) of the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences of USP; 100 reviews obtained in the process of discussing theoretical texts by graduate students of PPG in Philology and Portuguese Language of USP. The material produced in the editing situation is composed of six book chapters authored by doctors and doctoral students, obtained during the collective editing process for the publication of a book (the researcher was also the organizer of the book). In addition, support materials produced by the professor/researcher were collected, such as: planning of activities and notes on how to develop these activities in class or editing situations. The theoretical basis of the project consists of five foundations, exposed in Corrêa (2013), namely: (1) the pragmatic-enunciative basis of all written work; (2) the discursive basis of the identity of the subject, considered the relationship of otherness in its strong sense; (3) the basis for indicting the linguistic material in writing; (4) the dialogic basis for the teaching of writing; and (5) the discursive basis of the linguistic material and of the subject in the development of concepts for teaching. Methodologically, the analysis of the texts is oriented by a qualitative approach, and may eventually refer to quantification as a statistical verification. The expectation is to produce a basic research (analysis of texts and interpretation of results according to the topics listed) that has scope of application in teaching.

Professor in charge: Manoel Luiz Gonçalves Corrêa (mcorrea@usp.br)

 

Literacy, teaching, memory: the dialogical theory of language

Description: Literacies, teaching, memory: the dialogical theory of language is a project that has as its main theme the study on written production practices and the teaching of grammar in teaching materials of Portuguese language of Elementary School and High School. Based on theoretical studies of the concept of architectural of Bakhtin and the Circle, and its articulation with literacies in teaching materials, this project aims to: a) theoretically develop the architectural project. Often, many who study the architectural concept related it to content. This issue was addressed by Bakhtin in philosophical essays (1919; 1920-1924; 1920-1923). In the essay ‘The Problem of Content, Material, and Form in Verbal Creative Art’ (1924), he seeks to establish the difference between gender compositional form and architectural forms by assigning to the first a character of stability, teleologic, utility, although uneasy available to accomplish the architectural task. On the other hand, the architectural forms are forms of man’s physical and moral values, aesthetic forms of nature as an environment, forms of the event in its aspect of private, social, historical life, etc. (1998: 25). This distinction between compositional form and architectural form comes from the idea that the latter concept is born of a thought which has the human being as the central value, because there is a man who speaks, who interrogates, and seeks to establish interactive relationships, formulating questions and answers on the events of life; b) identify, analyse, and discuss the teaching collections approved by Programa Nacional do Livro Didático [National Educational Textbook Program] (2012/2014), seeking to identify similarities and differences between writing production proposals and the studies on grammar, and do the survey of categories of analysis, seeking to reconstitute the architectural design of the collections in the historic axis; c) develop subsidies for educational materials specifically targeted to High School, especially for written production, looking for a link between the proposed content and the different methodological procedures adopted, to provide the student an education as investigator and critical reader.

Professor in charge: Maria Inês Batista Campos (maricamp@usp.br)

 

Studies applied to the teaching of the mother tongue

Description: The project started in 2011 by coordinator Norma Seltzer Goldstein. Advisees enrolled in March 2012 began to integrate it: two master students (Danielle Capriolli Machado Silva and Simone Gonçalves) and three doctoral students (Helba Carvalho, Helena Weisz Salles, and Renata Angelica P. Ferreira). The research starts from the study of discursive and textual genres and use other relevant theoretical supports, aimed at applications in classes of Elementary School, High School, and College. The resulting corpora will be object of analysis and reflection that should result in proposals for study with reading, textual production, and grammar in the three levels of education.

Professor in charge: Norma Seltzer Godlstein (flc@usp.br)

 

Teaching and learning of Portuguese for speakers of other languages

Description: The objective of this project is to describe and analyse the processes of teaching-acquisition-learning Portuguese as a second language/ foreign language by speakers of other languages, both foreigners residing in Brazil, and indigenous communities.

Professor in charge: Rosane de Sá Amado (sorriso@usp.br)

 

Teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning of Portuguese as a foreign language

Description: This project aims to detect the beliefs of teachers of PLE (Portuguese Foreign Language). In this universe, the delimitation of the research concerns of the beliefs of these subjects, for beliefs about teaching, learning, foreign language, decisively influence the teaching practice. These conceptions, added to individual experiences, regulate, consciously or unconsciously, the actions and attitudes on choice of method and practice in the classroom. The knowledge of the beliefs of the professionals who will act in PLE brings the possibility of acting before them. Another objective is, therefore, from this reflection, to achieve new forms of performance and renewing of teaching methods of PLE. As methodological procedure, the research detects the beliefs of teachers through a questionnaire, interprets the answers and compares them with other researches already carried out on this topic.

Professor in charge: Maria Helena da Nóbrega (mhn135@usp.br)

 

Automatic analysis of emotional manifestations in PB: ExProsodia program applications

Description: The improvement of ExProsodia application for automatic analysis of emotional manifestations requires the definition of external parameters. For this we intend to carry out the research from the analysis of the production and analysis of intonation in speech perception. The research is combined between the team that develops the application in the Languages and Literature building in FFLCH/USP and the professors and students of Psychology and Veterinary programs of Faculdade Sudoeste Paulista (FSP), in Avaré, São Paulo, Brazil. The common interest of these institutions derives especially from the need to obtain more precise evaluations concerning emotional manifestations of individuals with various psychopathologies, such as schizophrenia and psychopathy, both before and after the cinotherapy treatment. Data will be collected by students of both institutions, analysed by ExProsodia and interpreted by professors and researchers of FSP and USP. The results obtained with these analyses shall be subsequently applied in tests of perception promoted by FSP’s team to verify the answers of individuals with psychopathology that present difficulty of perception of emotional information in the intonation of speech. As elements of comparison, 30 parameters were defined, considering mean pitch, focus/emphasis, duration, intensity, and pause. The selection of significant parameters will be made by means of the indications presented by statistical tests of cluster analysis and the multiple comparisons of Tukey or Tukey-Kramer, or yet of Dunnet’s test. Other analyses can be performed, if necessary. The application of these parameters in conjunction with the analysis made by ExProsodia will allow the synthesis of intonational curves. Based on this synthesis, perception tests shall be made with the purpose of assuring that the parameters defined as significant are effective. The development of the project, in addition to data collection, analyses, and syntheses, will involve a stage of training in the use of applications in general. There will be a need to install computers with more powerful features for the analyses in the nuclei for developing the project. The study should take place during the years 2013 to 2017.

Professor in charge: Waldemar Ferreira Netto (wafnetto@usp.br)

 

Genres of discourse, literacy, and teaching of Portuguese language

Description: The project aims to discuss issues regarding the teaching of Portuguese language concerning the production of texts and the promotion of literacy. We intend to observe the discursive genres that circulate in our society, in certain spheres (academic/educational, theatrical, and social networks), from the spoken and written language circulating in different environments to know the current situation and propose forwardings concerning the specific textual typology. The perspective comprises the processes of persuasion, seeking to investigate the current situation of education in this direction, either through the analysis of textbooks, or from interviews with professors and students, after more than two decades of deployment of the National Curriculum Parameters. Discussions around literacy permeate all the study, highlighting the importance of reading and production of different genres that circulate in our society, in addition to the necessary dialogue between the different discursive domains. The theoretical discussion is based on the research of Bakhtin (1992), Marcuschi (2004), Dolz and Schneuwly (2004), Fávero, Andrade, and Aquino (2008), among others.

Professor in charge: Zilda Gaspar Oliveira de Aquino (ziaquino@usp.br)

 

Between saying and said: academic literacy in teaching and research 

Description: Professor Manoel Luiz Gonçalves Corrêa, Ph.D. is a participant of Project 834/15: Academic discourse in research and teaching: questions around the appropriation of the others’ words, submitted to and selected by Capes/Cofecub (Call for Submission n. 19/2014). The project is coordinated, in France, by Sophie BAILLY, Ph.D. (Université de Lorraine) and, in Brazil, by Juliana A. ASSIS, Ph.D. (PUC – Mines), in addition to the collaboration of Université Stendhal, Grenoble 3 – Grenoble (FR), Université de Lille 3 – Lille (FR), UNICAMP, UNESP and University of São Paulo. Professor Manoel’s participation in this project takes the form of the development of the subproject Between saying and said: academic literacy in teaching and research. From the assumption that the problematics of literacy, be it initial or not, puts researchers before the difficulty of establishing frontiers between facts of language only apparently isolated, this subproject aims at the exploration of the frontier zone which is perhaps the most important: the one we may observe between saying and said, used here in a sense a little distinct from that of the title of Oswald Ducrot’s book (1997). Taking as a research object practices that are in a constant transition, researchers sometimes come across a not always easy delimitation of the field of the oral and that of the literate; sometimes note the interpenetration of formal and informal knowledge; at other times they detect the simultaneity of traditional and new forms of communication; and they may also be confronted by text vehicles and scopes of circulation that go from a restricted spatial-temporal dimension to another, very spacious, or they hear a powerful institutional voice beside non institutionalized discourses, the voice of the text-producing subject, as well as the voice of some other which makes itself heard. In this subproject, in which all these forms of transition are conceived as cases of appropriation of the other’s word and because of this as parts of the relation between saying and said, taken as the condition of language, the corpus was produced from the database of the CNPq group Práticas de leitura e escrita em português língua materna (Practices of reading and writing in Portuguese as mother tongue), and the research has chosen two sets of texts. The first one was the product of a collection carried out by the researcher responsible for this subproject and it has 79 texts produced by students of the first year of the course of Letters, result of an experience with teaching the genre panel (or poster); the second is composed by 07 academic articles, about to be published, produced by participants and / or invited author as part of the activities of the same research group, including MA students, doctorate students and doctors in post-doctorate studies, with the following peculiarity: the production of texts of the second group resulted from the analytical study of the material of the first one. Depending on the progress of the research, the corpus could receive more material. As regards expectations of results, this subproject intends to observe the forms of appropriation of the other’s discourse in two sets of texts, investigating, in the second set, in addition to these forms of appropriation, the way MA and doctorate students and post-doctorate doctors apprehend the phenomenon in eventual references that they make to it when they analyze texts of the first set.

Responsible professor: Manoel Luiz Gonçalves Corrêa (goncor@terra.com.br)

 

Careers and Occupations for Language Professionals

Description: As part of the syllabus of an undergraduate discipline, this project aims to analyse the diversity of occupations for professionals of Portuguese and foreign languages, and their respectives literatures and cultures, as well as to demonstrate different ways of working in the job market of languages. The aim is to broaden students knowledge about their career in the knowledge society, after the strong influence of information and communication technology. Becoming aware of the possibilities in companies, publishing houses and educational institutions, students can make up a career plan suitable for their personal interests and competencies.       

Professor in charge: Maria Helena da Nóbrega (mhn135@usp.br)

 

Portuguese language in Elementary, Secondary and Postsecondary education: from discursive and textual genres of textbooks, and academic, legal and political books to the textuality strategies of orality and writing

Description: The project is supported by CAPES. His proposal is to enhance the development of teaching and research projects among the three universities (USP / UFRN / UNISINOS), focusing the Portuguese language in Elementary, Secondary and Postsecondary  education, to integrate a network of researchers teachers and doctoral, master and undergraduate students of the three teams involved (USP / UFRN / UNISINOS), supporting the organization of missions, sandwiches stages, post-doc and participation in national and international events.

Professor in charge: General Coordinator: Zilda Oliveira Gaspar Aquino (zildaquino@terra.com.br), Coordinator Associated 1 (UFRN): Maria das Graças Soares Rodrigues, Associate Coordinator 2: Maria Eduarda Giering