As contribuições do suporte virtual glogster para o desenvolvimento das habilidades de leitura e produção textual

Abstract

Considering that the use of technology at schools is still limited and that we don’t know for sure which digital genres or virtual resources are the most effective for teaching or which methodology is the most appropriate for this goal, we seek to, through this research, verify if the continuous use of the interactive creation tool called Glogster brings contribution to the written comprehension and production skills development. In order to accomplish this, the data collected was analyzed in a comparative way through a pre and post-test given to students in the beginning and at the end of the didactics sequence. This sequence focused mainly on the opinion kind of speech genre under the theme of youth tribes. Two groups participated in this study, a group called the Controlled Group (CG) and a group called the Experimental Group (EG). The participants were students from the 7th grade/8th year of a Brazilian elementary public school located in Flores da Cunha, Rio Grande do Sul. We point out that both pre and post-tests were taken by the participants from the two groups through Glogster. The other activities proposed in the didactics sequence were done through Glogster by the EG and in regular classes by the CG. The data gathered from these two groups allowed us to compare the CG performance to the EG performance and notice that the continuous use of Glogster contributes to the students’ written production skill development regarding the opinion speech genre and that, when occasionally used, this resource also contributes to the reading skill development of this same genre. Based on language teaching from a socio discursive perspective which tries to show how “production and interpretation mechanisms of verbal entities contribute to people’s and, simultaneously, to social facts constant changes” (BRONCKART, 2006, p. 130), we point out that the aim of the activities carried out during this study was to use language in a competent way, that is, through coherent and meaningful activities. Thus, we believe that “[…] it’s not possible to conceive education as being apart from the production process and from social relations […]” (PAVIANI, 2010, p. 47). Within this scope, our work was conducted having in mind that the teaching and learning process takes place through interactions that subjects establish with others and with their environment. We also argue that “education can contribute to reduce differences and inequality, if it keeps up with the constant changes that are taking place in our society and offers schooling that is relevant to modern life needs” (PCNs, 1998, p. 138). In this account, we expect, with this study to provide scientific and social contributions to education in general and to the practice of teachers of different knowledge areas once we believe that working with language is by its nature interdisciplinary and that technology advances are reaching all school areas.