AWARENESS OF THE TEXTUAL GENRE CHARACTERISTICS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MULTILITERACIES

This paper presents a research that focused on raising students’ awareness of the main characteristics of a textual genre to support its written production in English at a secondary public school in Brazil. Based on the pedagogy of multiliteracies, this study promoted the collaborative and process writing of campaigns against animal abuse by 104 first-year students from five classes organized in groups of four. In the pre-writing phase, the students reflected on animal rights and critically analyzed some samples of campaigns on the same subject using a checklist containing the main characteristics of this textual genre. Elaborated collectively and piloted for some years by several teachers at this school, this instrument was also used both to guide the writing process and to subsidize the evaluation of the final production. Next, the groups chose a circumstance involving animal abuse to be the focus of their campaigns and organized their ideas in a conceptual map. Throughout the writing process, the students searched the internet for images, looked up words in print and online dictionaries, used text and image editors, and created logos on a website in order to indicate the authorship of the campaigns. During the rewriting phase, the teacher went from group to group giving feedback. Finally, the post-writing phase involved the production of a set of slides that documented the groups’ reflections on the production of their campaigns and served as support for the oral presentation of their work. The campaigns made by the students are rich in multimodal resources, what shows their creativity in meaning making. It was possible to notice that they developed their levels of autonomy and critical literacy by investing in a collaborative work that demanded intense negotiation. By having mediated the whole process, the checklist was essential for the students to become aware of the characteristics of a campaign, what assured the quality of their productions.