Oral genres, argumentation and teaching

Abstract

This paper aims at dealing with issues related to language spoken in the classroom, focusing on discursive practices that highlight argumentation. We believe that the discussions that were made around genres, especially guided by the studies of Bakhtin and Text Linguistics, have been providing a breakthrough towards the necessity for the school to promote language teaching through the discursive genre approach. That is what we expect to be happening since both  writing and spoken modalities deserve space in learning. We believe that oral genres demand that teachers acquire specific knowledge of the features of spoken language interaction that arise from its use in practical situations. Because these studies are recent among our researchers (not longer than three decades), they should still be very present in our discussions. In this paper, we focus on a specific genre of oral tradition – the debate. It is ideal for knowledge building and taking a stand at issues that arise in society, all of which is particularly important to the school. Besides contributing to the development of skills required by certain sociodiscursive practices, it is proposed that the teaching of argumentation in oral genres concentrate on the observation of selected strategies in interactions. We are particularly interested in interactions that emerge when one interaction party is trying to persuade the other. The corpus consists of the transcriptions of debates which occurred both in the classroom and in other contexts, such as the media. The methodological approach is done by identifying the arguments and their strategic use in specific situations. The theoretical discussion rests on the works of Orecchioni (2010), Marcuschi (2004), Dolz and Schneuwly (2004), Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1996 [1958]), among others.