Situated meanings within literacy events in the academic context

Abstract

The constitution of literate students in the academic context represents a situated and contextualized process due to the verbal meaning and interactions between the students and the language. Taking in consideration this socio-cultural perspective to literacies and the contributions from the Bakhtinian discourse genres theory, the current paper aims at characterizing the literate constitution of freshmen students in the Language Teacher Education Program (Letras), in literacy events of the academic classes. At the heart of these events, dialogic shifts of three students are analized, which indicate the studies of ethnographic cases in focus, for having investigation of longitudinal processes. These processes occur through a participant observation in two courses, lectured by the same professor in the Letras Course during the whole year of 2005. The follow-up of the work done gave the opportunity to prove that the discoursive genres were the objects of teaching-learning as a result of many reflective and critical actions. Consequently, it was possible to identify distinct events - interDiscoursive Events, identitarian Events and reflective-transformative Events - and characterize different literacy events in which students establish themselves as academic literate students. These results go against the discourse of literacy’s crisis of high-level teaching, since the dialogical practice with the language gives support to the socio-construction about and of language knowledge.