Interpretation and teachers’ performance

Abstract

This paper reflects on a concept which is essential to discourse analysis and also relevant to the field of reflection on teacher training: the concept of interpretation. This text focuses on a theoretical perspective that sees subject formation as constituted by the discursive memory, which includes other historically constructed utterances, and is renewed in the subject’sspeech. As a result, interpretation is understood as a gesture,  i.e., an act on a symbolic level, the proper place of ideology,materialized by history. Methodologically, the audio of 15 hours of interpretation activities carried out in a class of fourth-graders was recorded. Afterwards, recordings were transcribed and discursive regularities described. In the analyses, the regularity found by the gesture of interpretation was the floor-holding/floor-taking process, which breaks the  discursive sequence. Within the pedagogic discourse, the interruption of the discursive thread was found regular in the subject’s discursive practice, as a way of disrupting meanings and indicating other interpretative processes.