Construction of reflection in academic writing by pre-service teachers

Abstract: We have investigated the uses of clause complexes in which primary clauses are identified as mental clauses in reflective academic writing present in reports written by pre-service teachers. The texts were produced as a final evaluation for compulsory Teaching Practice disciplines in Portuguese, English, and Mathematics Teacher Education courses, with greater emphasis on the latter. The main analytical categories are the experiential and logic components that integrate the ideational metafunction of language proposed in the grammatical approach of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Results have shown the recurrent construction of representations by the authors themselves as those that experience the phenomena related to perceptive and cognitive mental processes. These processes are responsible, respectively, for the elaboration of descriptive and narrative textual sequences, as well as for the explicitness of more critical positioning.