Rewriting in Academic Productions: an indicator of textual refinement in undergraduate courses?

Abstract

The objective of this work is to investigate whether the activity of rewriting texts causes interference in terms of improvement and development of the writing of beginning university students, considering that they are in the process of understanding academic textual production practices. Specifically, we seek to identify the preknowledge of university students about the writing process and academic practices of textual production, to observe the process of writing texts by comparing different versions in order to identify the practice of rewriting and, finally, to analyze the possible effects of this practice. We believe that writing is an essential resource for society and its mastery guarantees subjects the insertion and permanence in different fields of human activity. Researchers such as Hayes and Flower (1980, 1981) and Prado (2019) point out that it happens in the midst of a process that requires the writing to go through several stages, including rewriting, which is the remaking of the text with a view to improving it. Furthermore, according to Bakhtin (2016), human activity is linked to the use of language, which happens through discursive genres generated in spaces of interaction and communication, which are fields of language use. This is the case of the academic field, a specific space of scientific production that elaborates more specialized discursive genres, which, precisely because of this characteristic, are, to a certain extent, distanced from individuals who are not part of it. In order to carry out our investigation, we produced logbooks based on observation of classes in a class from the first semester of the Literature course, at a public university in the interior of Bahia. Our corpus is made up of the logbooks mentioned above, the teaching materials used in the classroom, the answers to a questionnaire applied to the class, different versions of texts written by four students and, finally, the transcription of an interview we carried out with the end of the methodological process. In addition to the Bakhtinian perspective of language as an instrument of interaction, we take as our main theoretical basis the expansion of the cognitive model of writing by Hayes and Flower (1980, 1981) carried out by Prado (2019); the studies, mainly, by Fabre (1986, 1991, 2000, 2002), by Fiad (2009, 2013) and by Menegassi (1998) regarding rewriting; the considerations of literacy by Soares (2004) and Lea and Street (1998), and of academic literacy by Fisher (2008), Bezerra (2012) and Marinho (2010). Our data reveal that the rewriting task enables autonomous, interactive and dialogic textual production, capable of enhancing the writer's writing practice and effectively assisting him in his constitution as an academic subject.