The titles of stories that children (re)tell: a “poetics” of brevity without the anguish of influence

Abstract

Whereas nobody denies the importance of literature in school, the way in which the language of literary texts is taught and, above all, the role that writing can have in this process is controversial and debatable (Tauveron, 2005; Pereira, 2008). However, in this paper, we assume the relevance of the production of fictional narratives, from an early age, to the knowledge of the functioning of these texts and to the development of the capacity to appreciate and interpret them. It is intended, therefore, to focus on the analysis of invented story titles by 2nd grade children, aiming, in a textual genetics perspective (Lacoste-Doquet, 2013; Boré, 2010), to understand the origins of titles as well as their semantic and syntactic strtucture. Data were collected during the academic year 2015, in an Urban School and in a Rural School, in the district of Aveiro. We asked for the production of 3 stories invented by students in dyads, in a total of 10 dyads for each school. The data were recorded using the Ramos System, a technique that allows to record in real time the text in progress, providing information about the writing process and making it possible to use the video recorder to interpret in a deeper way the production process. An analysis of the content of the titles  was carried out, highlighting the influence of other writings known by the children, namely other short stories of children’s literature that were read and texts of the different textbooks which make part of their intertext. The conclusions point, above all, to the decisive influence of the title production work in dyads in the subsequent individual productions, as well as to the emergence of parameters that define the title of a tale by reproducing texts read, in spite of the attempts to reconstruct and create original titles.