The use of didactic sequences and the teaching of L1: An analysis of an institutional program of teaching writing at school

Abstract

A competitive program called "Writing the Future (Escrevendo o Futuro)", developed with the aim of improving written production at Brazilian public schools may gain importance in a context where meaningful reading and writing skills are considered key factors to social inclusion and to personal, educational and professional achievements. This paper will begin by presenting an overview of the Brazilian Competitive Program "Writing the Future (Escrevendo o Futuro)" developed using a genrebased approach, before proceeding with the following objectives: a) to analyze written texts produced by students who used the Program's didactic sequence as a learning tool of the didactic intervention work, and b) to debate critically teaching writing at school with such a program. Didactic sequences are defined as a group of school activities systematically organized within a class project (Dolz & Schneuwly, 1998: 93) aimed at developing students' language capacities. The texts were analyzed according to two dimensions: a) the criteria established by the program itself; b) the language plans that constitute any text (according to Bronckart, 2003). As a preliminary result, the levels of (in)adequacy of the texts produced in the genre taught in the didactic sequence may be stressed, as well as the type of difficulty of linguistic accuracy in general. Another result is the kind of pedagogic practice underlying the proposal, together with the different dimensions of teacher education it may involve.