CONTROL AND IMPROVEMENT OF PUNCTUATION IN ACADEMIC WRITING: A PEDAGOGICAL INTERVENTION WITH TEACHERS UNDER FORMATION AT ARIQUEMES/RO

Abstract

Difficulties on written expression are common at all levels of the Brazilian educational system. This fact becomes even more worrying when dealing with Pedagogy students, future literacy teachers. Starting from this worrying scenario, this article goes back to a research that aimed to plan, implement and evaluate a pedagogical intervention consisting of a didactic proposal aimed to Pedagogy students’ writing improving, at Ariquemes, interior in the state of Rondônia. The research, with a qualitative approach, a pedagogical intervention, undertaken from September 2018 to March 2019, was based on theoretical-methodological assumptions of the Cultural-Historical Theory and Textual Linguistics – in dialogue with research on the subject. The participants were six academics from the 4th period of Pedagogy Course, selected according to performance diagnoses regarding writing, carried out with the whole class. The texts were analyzed through linguistic and grammatical evaluation and the data organized through discursive textual analysis. In this manuscript, we deal with the results referring to the Category of analysis “Control and improvement of the act of writing”, with special attention to the subcategory “Punctuation: comma and period”. We highlight, among the research’s main findings, the awareness about writing problems expansion on the part of academics; the perception of the need to revise their texts and the increase in the possibilities of controlling aspects related to the use of commas and periods. This investigation results show that the pedagogical intervention carried out contributed to the improvement of the participants' ability to express themselves in writing.