Genre-Based Pedagogy in Paulo Freire’s Country: Teaching Brazilian Students to Write Essays for the National High School Exam

Abstract

From the perspective of the appraisal system, this article discusses how 60 high school students from two private Brazilian schools align with their readers in texts written as preparation for the Brazilian National High School Exam. Adopting a mixed methodology, a corpus of 301 texts produced by the students was analyzed. Results showed that students' commitment to proposals for social intervention increased throughout the analyzed course, which meant that students started to adopt more critical and proactive stances in their essays. In addition, results showed how students align with their readers, confirming the paramount importance of mastering written language for the development of school literacies, as suggested by Halliday (1996). In terms of implications for pedagogy, the experience brought about new insights for course design and improvements in students’ writing, as well as a better understanding of the role of language in literacy projects. Finally, it confirmed the possibility of building an interface between a genre-based pedagogy and Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy.

Keywords

• essay writing
• national exams
• genre-based pedagogy
• APPRAISAL system
• critical pedagogy