Tessituras do letramento digital na produção do gênero meme por estudantes do nono ano do Ensino Fundamental II

Abstract

Although in contemporary urban Brazil, the technology has a ubiquitous character, we realized that after two decades of publication of the National Curriculum Parameters (PCN) (BRAZIL, 1998), the digital technologies are still precariously exploring in Basic Education. Considering this scenario, we have some questions: How to foment digital literacies practices by exploring the digital genres?; How can the school contribute to deepening this knowledge, making it an instrument to acting critically? Thus, we aimed to analyze the impacts of a teaching sequence (CORDEIRO, 2015) involving digital literacies in the Portuguese Language subjects, in the ninth grade classes of Elementary School of a public school in Dourados City, Mato Grosso do Sul State, Brazil. Based on the diagnosis of semi-structured interviews, we decided for the meme genre production (because the students read and share a lot this digital genre on the Internet) and developed a teaching sequence that made possible a deeper and critical reading about the genre and its production. The corpus is composed for the multimodal productions of the students, the audio of the semi-structured interviews and the video recording of the intervention at school class. This participatory research, inserted in applied linguistics field, has a qualitative approach and an interpretative basis. Furthermore, the research has as theoretical contribution the studies on Multiliteracies (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2000; STREET, 2006; 2014; BARTON; LEE, 2015; DUDENEY; HOCKLY; PEGRUM, 2016), Speech Genres (BAKHTIN, 1997; CORRÊA, 2013; ROJO; BARBOSA, 2015; VOLOCHINÓV, 2018) and Narrative Semiotics (Greimas’ Semiotics Theory) (BARTHES, 1990; FIORIN, 1999; GREIMAS; COURTÉS, 2008). This interface between the applied linguistics studies, the semiotics and the practices that involve digital literacy gives to the research its transdisciplinary character. Therefore, we consider the memes, composed by photos and subtitle, both multimodal texts and syncretic texts, since they integrate the verbal and the no verbal in the same enunciation. Finally, the selection and analysis of the memes provided the delineation of the digital literacies (hypermidiatic) mobilized by the student authors for the creation of these digital texts; while the semiotic theory was used to analyze the final product: the memes (syncretic texts) generated from such literacies. On the other hand, the literacies demonstrated: the students used more mobile applications than the website suggested for activity command; they had an intuitive semiotic knowledge; they explored effects of reality to construct the texts’ senses and they knew how to use the humor without appealing to biased clichés.