Initial training of Portuguese teachers and didactic elaboration of teaching contents: the case of a university in the itajaí valley

Abstract

This paper focuses on the didactic elaboration of the notion of speech genres for learning and teaching practices involving reading/listening, writing and linguistics analysis,  which emerged from supervised training projects and reports produced by undergraduate students in the end of their initial training within the context of an English/Portuguese Undergraduate Course of Modern Languages from an university located in the region of Itajaí Valley (Santa Catarina, Brazil). This research comprised the analysis of 40 training documents produced from the first semester of 2002 until the second semester of 2008. This period covers the transition between two curricular frameworks of the researched course. Within the first curricularframework, there was a remarkable concern about classifying texts according to the genre they belonged to and work was frequently guided by the classic school typology of texts (narration, description and dissertation). Within the second curricular framework, although speech genres are not often object of didactic elaboration in efect, we observed a perspective of change that may be verified in the concern about researching the speech genre with which the undergraduate student will work, and about trying to enable the student to acquire a procedimental knowledge about the genre in the articulation between reading and writing practices