THE TEACHING OF PUNCTUATION MARKS FROM THE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE
Reading. Writing. Rewritten. Text. Interpretation.
This dissertation presents the Intervention Project developed with students in the 9th year of Elementary School, in a school in the state network of Cuiabá-MT in the 2022 academic year. Affiliated to the French Discourse Analysis (AD), established by Michel Pêcheux, in France, and Eni Orlandi and other researchers in the field, in Brazil, we aim to give a new meaning to the process of teaching the use of full stops, question marks, exclamations and ellipsis, in a discursive approach. To do so, it was necessary to return to the meanings of language, text, reading, writing, interpretation, core notions to the understanding that “[...] subjects and meanings can always be other.” (ORLANDI, 2020, p.35). Working with punctuation, from the perspective of AD, meant giving students a different perspective on how these signs work, in everyday practices of reading, writing and rewriting text, other than memorizing grammatical rules. The students also realized that these marked marks, taken as “discursive signs” (GRANTHAM, 2009, p.16) cannot be understood only as segmenting or limiting a sentence or period, but as a place for the production of meaning. Thus, from the use of punctuation in textual practices of written production, they experienced the equivocation that is constantly created by the language/history relationship. If on the one hand, discursively, they understood that language is of the order of incompleteness - the opening of the text to other meanings -, on the other, the subject-author has the precision to write organized texts - a complete, closed form -, in search of of unity, clarity, coherence. The activities were carried out through conversation circles, debates, research, seminars, expository classes - practices in which the text was fundamental for meaningful learning. For AD, a text means regardless of its extension or materiality, and can be a word, a set of phrases (written or oral), an image, a sound... But it is it – the text – the piece that makes the gear work. Another way of dealing with the language, of handling content seen, until then, under the aegis of grammatical rules, led students to participate with satisfaction in the proposed activities.