A Produção do gênero acadêmico abstract: da estratégia de correção à reescrita

Abstract

Several text production practices are evident in academic life, and materializes itself in a diversity of discursive genres. Given this situation, academic literacy is a topic that university must give special attention to promote and develop the students reading and writing abilities. Scientific abstract is a common and important academic genre that plays a significant role in disseminating new knowledge within scientific communities, in this context, being characterized as a production where essential skills and abilities are required and need to be developed to achieve a text quality. This paper aims to verify how students construct their abstracts through written and rewritten, observing whether, in this process, they added to their written productions, progressively, the discursive qualities proposed by Guedes (2009), namely: thematic unity, questioning, objectivity and concreteness. An action research was carried out, and data were collected in an English for specific purposes course, which aimed to promote academic literacy among non-native speakers of English. The course was offered for local community by the extension project “Centro de Línguas” which took place in the Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados, located in the city of Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul state – Brazil. The corpus of this work is composed for twelve students’ texts that had their written and rewritten abstracts comparatively analyzed especially regarding formal structure of the genre and discursive qualities. A didactic intervention for teaching the genre abstract was carried out grounded on the view of dialogical notion of language focusing on the development of discursivity on writing. The analysis was based on interpretative perspective. Preliminary results suggest the lack of discursive qualities aforementioned on the first written version and, on the other hand, the effective presence of discursive qualities and the relatively stable features of the genre in the latest version rewritten by the students. This indicates that the methodology can be effective to improve the literacy learning of students, not only in writing abstract genres, but also in other genres.