An evaluation proposal of didactic sequences focused on writing

Abstract

Text/discursive genres, literacy and didactic sequences have been so widely employed by teachers/professors and researchers that seem to have become ‘magic keys’, as Bunzen (2004) mentions while talking about genres. Certainly, when using such concepts, we assume a quest for a more meaningful teaching and learning process, which enables students to act in more conscious and critical ways. That is, we seek to contribute to the students’ literacy in several social practices. Nonetheless, the broad use of such terms brings the concern to the risk of a reduction of such notions and even some camouflage, i.e., a new grammar in the text level (Signorini, 2001). Aware of the possible distance between what we want and what we actually do, as professors and researchers coming from a sociodiscursive perspective, we developed an instrument to evaluate didactic sequences focused on writing, which was employed in the evaluation of the material used during the data collection for the doctorate research study of one of us. This tool allows us to critically evaluate our own material and analyze if it can (or can not) collaborate effectively to the students’ development of language capacities (Schneuwly and Dolz, 2004) that are needed to act in specific social contexts. In this text, we recover some concepts of the theory that lay the foundation of our work and present our proposal. Key words: text genres, evaluation of didactic sequence, writing.