The Role of Themes in the Production of Opinion Articles by 9th-Grade Students
Theme. Opinion article. Text productions. Didactic sequence.
The theme is one of the main mechanisms to guide the production of an opinion article. Based on this aspect, in this research, our goal was to investigate how themes, as elements of discursive genres, could spark the interest of 9th-grade students to produce more and better (in terms of constructing their argumentation) in the genre of opinion articles. To achieve this, we used the following theoretical framework: the concept of the classroom as a formative space for critical thinking, as evidenced by Antunes (2003); the conception of text, according to Koch (2003) and Marcuschi (2008); the concept of theme, based on Rojo and Barbosa (2015); the construction of argumentation, based on Fiorin (2015); the notion of discursive genre with an emphasis on the opinion article, taking Bakhtin (2003), Castellani and Barros (2018) as references; and the didactic sequence (DS) as an instrument for a mediation plan, according to Dolz, Noverraz, and Schneuwly (2004). The corpus of this research consists of the textual productions of 9th-grade students from Manoel Luis de Maria State School in the city of Lagoa Nova/RN. Regarding methodology, the research adopts a quantitative-qualitative approach. This approach was used to verify whether students who worked with themes closer to their experiences produced more and better texts.