Teaching textual genres in Language and Literature classes or Language Practice classes

Abstract

This paper addresses the concept of textual genre from the theoretical framework of sociodiscursive interactionism, whose epistemological conception derives from Valentin Voloshinov’s notion of dialogical speech, published in 1929 as Marxism and philosophy of language.

In schools, it is expected that Language and Literature or Language Practices teachers teach reasoning in the mother tongue.

From our didactic perspective, we propose textual genre as a theoretical-methodological tool, defined by social use, which circulates in classrooms as a concept derived from common sense. Consequently, we will revisit this concept in order to discuss and present it theoretically in the proposal for teaching textual genres in schools.

Based on our research in first language didactics at the primary, secondary and higher education levels (Riestra, 2010, 2014, 2018), we wonder how children and young people learn to produce texts in schools today. We found that teachers generally rely on the circulation of cognitive and textualistic linguistic theories, causing so-called text types or textual genres to function as abstract linguistic descriptors in practice.

Starting from practice language for teaching implies not only reflecting on theory but also analyzing our own language actions as teachers. This is the didactic proposal that we developed for teacher training.

To study the adoption and adaptation of textual genres, Bronckart (2007) introduces the Vygotskian concept of development in the elaboration of didactic sequences.

From our teaching activity, we maintain that it is in the diversity of genres where all the teaching contents of a language are condensed. Therefore, we propose the modeling of genres as a necessary research task in Language Didactics.