Inês Signorini

Literacy and communicative (in)flexibility: interactional failure in Brazilian programs of diffusion of knowledge☆

The present paper tries to show how the beliefs (or myths) related to literacy and to school practices on the one hand, and to scientific epistemologies on the other, contribute to theoretical and practical difficulties in the acquisition and improvement of communicative flexibility in discursive actions involving status hierarchies and positional identities. Combining ethnographic insight with a contextualist approach of dialogue as intersubjective construction, it builds on the notion of communicative flexibility as (a) an ability to redefine situations as a function of the interlocutor, and, above all, (b) a capacity to accept the coauthorship of the interlocutor in any new sociocultural order to be established or sustained by interactional activity. The data come from institutional programs in Northeast Brazil, implemented as of 1984 for the diffusion of technology and scientific knowledge. In addition to the routine interactions between the social actors involved in these programs, the corpus for analysis also consisted of the oral and written evaluations of the programs focused on. The choice of institutional programs as a context for the collection of data was due primarily to the emancipatory function officially attributed to these programs, as well as to the technological-scientific basis of the knowledge to be disseminated within them.

Literacy and legitimacy: Unschooled councilmen in legislative sessions

Abstract The number of adults with little schooling being elected to local government positions has increased considerably in Brazil lately — especially in the case of city councils that were traditionally controlled by representatives of mainstream groups. The aim of this paper is to examine the conflict inherent in this process of ascent of the unschooled to positions of power where the functioning rules follow mainstream bureaucratic patterns. The analysis is based on data collected during a city council session in which the mayor of a small town in a nonindustrialized region submitted a budget draft; other sources of data included diaries and recorded interviews. Through ethnographic and discourse analysis we show that the almost illiterate councilmen (small farmers). although they have the majority of votes, do not have access to discussions and do not significantly affect outcomes, since such things are controlled by the local government bureaucracy. The relationship among literacy, mainstream institutional metapragmatics, and democracy is also discussed.

(Re)definições e (des)construções identitárias em comunidades ativistas do Facebook: contribuições das epistemologias pós-feminista e queer

This paper presents some research results on identity related to genre and sexuality carried out in six Facebook activist communities. Through the analysis of discussions on identity (re)definitions and (de)constructions mediated by multimodal writing in these virtual sociointeractional spaces, it points out the contributions of post-modern feminist theory, named post-feminism, and queer theory towards a better understanding of the phenomena studied, and argues that these contributions are relevant as instruments of knowledge production in a contemporaneous process which is of great interest to the applied field of language studies.

Língua, linguagem e mediação tecnológica

This paper focuses on concepts and models which constitute the digital artifact and user interface as objects of study in two transdisciplinary areas in computing science. Its aim is to contribute to the discussions in the applied field of language studies about technological mediations in language practices and in the different languages found in the contemporary computing artifacts.

A co-construção de uma carta como objeto- de-discurso e de ensino-aprendizagem em uma aula de língua materna (LM)

In this work we present the result of an analysis of a mother-language class delivered to students of the 6th grade of fundamental school in a public school at the periphery of the city of Campinas/ SP. In this class, there was a collective construction of a letter to the school principal. As the letter constitutes a new referent, besides a teaching-learning object, it also constituted a discourse object. Besides the studies of interactional sociolinguistics, the analyses are also based on studies on referencing which come from conversation analysis of ethnomethodological inspiration. Key words: teaching of writing, discourse objects, interaction, mother language teaching-learning.