Nas trilhas da reivindicação: a carta aberta e o desenvolvimento da argumentação no ensino de língua portuguesa

Abstract

Contemporary society, characterized by a plurality of opinions on various events, has demanded argumentative competence from students at different levels of education in the written production of texts. Argumentative genres are widely required in society, and it is possible to state that good performance in reading and writing these genres can contribute to better individual performance in the social sphere. Based on this context, the present research aimed to investigate how the development and implementation of a teaching project focused on a claiming argumentative genre, such as the open letter, can contribute to the development of argumentative competence in 7th-grade students of Elementary School II, helping them defend viewpoints and develop relevant and appropriate arguments for the construction of critical positions in favor of collective interests. The study, conducted within the scope of the Professional Master's Program in Letters at UFMG (Profletras), was characterized as pedagogical intervention research. Its central objective was the systematic work with the genre "open letter" through the development and implementation of a teaching project in a 7th-grade class at a public school in Belo Horizonte. The research was grounded in three main axes: (1) argumentative theory, such as Perelman (1996), Reboul (2004), and Fiorin (2018); (2) argumentation as a social practice fostering criticality and autonomy, based on Breton (1996) and Freire (1970); (3) teaching argumentation in classrooms, highlighted by Azevedo (2013, 2019, 2023). Contributions from language studies, such as Vygotsky (1991, 2007) on social interaction and Bakhtin's (2006 [1929]) sociointeractionist conception, were also incorporated. For discourse genres and their teaching, the study was anchored in works by Bakhtin (2003 [1979], 2011 [1959]), Rojo and Barbosa (2015), Lopes-Rossi (2006, 2011, 2012, 2015), Koch and Elias (2011, 2016), Swales (2009), and studies on the "open letter" genre by Costa (2019) and Franco and Zanutto (2017). Methodologically, the research involved classroom intervention with qualitative and interpretative analysis, aligned with the stages of interventionist research by Damiani (2012). Data were collected from initial and final productions of three students, which were analyzed to assess argumentative evolution. The results indicated that writing argumentative texts developed through teaching projects contributed to the improvement of students' text production in Portuguese Language classes in basic education. Furthermore, the study revealed that this process fosters education focused on forming autonomous and critical individuals capable of asserting their rights in a society marked by inequality and social injustices.