Progression in writing fables: a longitudinal study in Basic Education

Abstract

This article focuses on the development of written production, in the context of teacher training (Pereira & Cardoso, 2013) for teaching writing of a certain textual genre (Pereira, 2014). There are not many longitudinal studies on the analysis of texts of the same textual genre (Gouveia, 2013) and many of these studies do not coincide in the recognition that students evolve and in which dimensions (Moura, 2012). From a Didactics point of view, it seems important to analyse the writings of students before and after an intervention program, in order to legitimize teaching procedures by means of Teaching / Didactic Sequences. In the present case, the formative process focused essentially on the generic formatting of the fable and one of our central objectives is to analyse the initial and final productions of 4th, 6th and 8th grade students and to understand how didactic work on this textual genre allowed them to improve their performances. We hypothesize that gender-based work translates into an improvement in textual quality and genericity (Beacco, 2013, Adam, 2014). Thus, we have analysed texts from three classes, one of each level of basic education, trying to find differences between the two versions, at the level of some gender parameters: text plan; enunciative process; forms of presence / absence of morals; characteristics of the narrator and the characters. By contrast, we will also present results from three so-called “control groups”, ie students from the same schools whose teachers were not in that training.