The meanings of writing in higher education: text production in the discourse of teachers and students from Portuguese and English graduation classrooms

Following a growing tendency of works in the field of language studies and education that investigate the written text production of students in Higher Education and the difficulties they present to produce texts that are communicatively relevant and successful, we aim at examining the work with text genres in the production of written texts in Higher Education. In this sense, we will focus particularly on the exam of two issues: the purpose of the text genres produced by students of Portuguese and English graduation courses and the possible interlocutors of these genres produced by them. Data were collected through questionnaires given to students and teachers of a public Higher Education institution. This paper adopts the conception of language as a process of interaction and the reflections on discourse genres from the studies of the Bakhtin Circle, as well as discussions about the genres and their teaching presented by other scholars. The results show that the teaching of text production in the context of Higher Education classroom caters mainly to the discipline specificities, revealing yet few initiatives that enable authentic situations of communicative interaction.

鉴于语言研究与教育领域日益涌现的相关研究方向——聚焦高等教育阶段学生的书面文本创作，以及学生在产出具备交际有效性与成功性文本时所面临的困境，本研究旨在探讨高等教育书面文本创作中的文本体裁教学实践。据此，本研究将重点聚焦两大议题：葡萄牙语与英语本科专业学生所创作文本体裁的交际目的，以及这些学生创作的各类体裁文本的潜在交际对象。本研究数据通过向某公立高等教育机构的学生与教师发放问卷收集获得。本研究秉持语言作为互动过程的核心观念，借鉴巴赫金学派（Bakhtin Circle）的话语体裁研究视角，同时吸纳其他学者关于体裁及其教学的相关论述。研究结果显示，高等教育课堂中的文本创作教学主要围绕学科特性展开，能够为学生提供真实交际互动场景的实践举措仍较为匮乏。