The discourse of undergraduate language students: “Lack of cohesion, lack of coherence in the text of a 10-year-old girl!”

Abstract

Our aim in this article is to discuss the way the concepts of textual cohesion and coherence are manifested in texts produced by undergraduate Language students enrolled in Brazilian Universities. This research is based on the concept of dialogism and the concept of enunciative heterogeneity. We have departed from the presupposition that the discourse of the undergraduate students is constitutively heterogeneous; and thus it can be captured from the textual surface by means of marks related to the marked heterogeneity concept. According to the results, we found that the discursive positioning of these students reveal discursive formations linked to didactic and pedagogical discourse, generally marked by a prescriptive-normative attitude, and that the references to textual cohesion and coherence indicate diverse notions, based on a traditional view of language.