Shadow puppetry, literature, and public speaking in the 6th grade: a project based on the short story "Menina Bonita do Laço de Fita" by Ana Maria Machado.
Shadow puppetry; continuum of orality and writing; retextualization; performance.
This research aims to investigate the influence of shadow puppetry on improving the public speaking skills (Koch/Oesterreicher 1990) of a sixth-grade class. Furthermore, it intends to offer a pedagogical workbook with a proposed shadow puppetry workshop based on the short story "Menina Bonita do Laço de Fita" by Ana Maria Machado. This educational product will provide instructions for Portuguese language teachers to implement shadow puppetry in the classroom. Therefore, we emphasize that our research follows the theoretical assumptions of de Fávero (2006), Beltrame (2012), Oliveira (2018; 2022) on shadow puppetry; Koch and Oesterreicher (2007) and their proposal of a continuum of orality and writing; Marcuschi (2010) and the concept of retextualization; and Kabatek (2006) and the concept of discursive traditions. This research draws on the work of Coseriu (1992) regarding linguistic levels and viewpoints; and on the work of Castilho da Costa (1996, 2015, 2020, 2021) on these themes. Considering the above, the initial step in our research is sensitization: a play adapted for shadow puppetry, retextualized and presented to the class by this teacher-researcher, whose base text is the book "Menina Bonita do Laço de Fita" by Ana Maria Machado. The next step consists of intentionally provoking each student individually to develop spontaneous oral communication in the classroom. At this point, recordings will be made using a voice recorder and audio transcription with the Notta application, which will form the initial corpus of our studies, the analytical basis for conversational operators, hesitations, and repetitions. The following stage is a shared reading, in its entirety, of Ana Maria Machado's book. This moment anticipates the production of retextualizations of this work into dramatic scripts for shadow puppetry, produced in groups by the students. After completing this stage, in a workshop, the students will construct the silhouettes of their characters and the settings for their stories, developing their creativity and preparing for the performance of their presentations, since we have defined shadow puppetry as both our starting point and our expected end goal. The students' spontaneous productions and retextualizations will be compared in a graph, taking into account quantitative and qualitative aspects, as well as the communicative situations of orality or writing, to establish the results. In other words, our work will analyze whether the phonic features have progressively decreased, bringing the students' oral production closer to the standards of writing.